Numerical Implementation of Shape Design Sensitivity Analysis by Boundary Integral Equation for Fillet Design Problem

A general formula for shape design sensitivity developed by the authors is applied to a fillet design problem to minimize the maximum stress on the boundary. The sensitivity is calculated by solving two sets of the same boundary integral equations with only different inputs. A representation of the boundary with a cubic spline is found very suitable for numerical implementation. The minimax problem is efficiently handled by a sequence of linear programmings. The approach is indicative of a practical future direction for structural designs of similar nature.