STRUCTURAL OPTIMISATION USING ADVANCED RADIAL BASIS FUNCTIONS MESH MORPHING

It is well known that shape optimization is a way t o improve the structural performance of components and tools based on parametric geometries are becomi ng standard for fine-tuning optimization processes in industry. These tools can handle diff rent types of structural analysis, but they are li mited by difficulties in maintaining geometry coherence. Direct update of nodal positions of finite element models by mesh morphing is a meaningful alternativ e to re-meshing a parametric geometry, helping the designer in what-if studies, optimization and r obust design development without geometry coherence problems. Radial Basis Functions (RBF) ar e recognized among the best mathematical tools to perform mesh morphing. An industrial implementat ion of RBF is available in the software RBF Morph TM born for CFD applications and now available in ANS YS Mechanical as an Extension created using the new Application Customization Toolkit (ACT) of Ansys. We present an industrial application of SACMI based on RBF Morph and Ansys Mechanical : starting from a defined topology the paper shows how mesh morphing ca be used to obtain the best shape in terms of component reliability.