Tension and compression affine materials

Publications:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-018-02189-0

Concrete is economical but rather weak under tension load, whereas steel may bear tension and compression very well, but is much less economical. Therefore, an simplified approach for economical steel-concrete structures is to apply concrete only in regions predominant to compression loading and steel under tension loading. By introducing an energetic penalization, this approach can be implemented into an topology optimization with two elastic materials, in which one material is affine to compression (e.g. concrete) and one is affine to tension (e.g. steel). Due to different elastic properties of the both materials, i.e. Young's modulus an Poisson's ratio, the resulting optimization depends strongly on the load direction.