Plasticity

Plastic deformation or plastic zones can weaken the structure drastically or are also planned into the design of structure. Usual approaches for optimization with plastic material require the calculation of a full plasticity analysis with multiple load steps until convergence for each design optimization step, which results in a lot of mechanical analysis steps and therefore large calculation efforts. In the novel approach, a dissipation-free plasticity model is applied, whose evolution is path-independent, so that only one mechanical analysis step is required for each optimization step. In combination with the operator split, the calculation effort for the optimization with plastic material is negligible higher than for an optimization with pure elastic material.