Abstract
This paper presents a reliability-based shape optimization (RBSO) using the evolutionary structural optimization (ESO). An actual design involves uncertain conditions such as material property, operational load, poisson's ratio and dimensional variation. The deterministic optimization (DO) is obtained without considering of uncertainties related to the uncertainty parameters. However, the RBSO can consider the uncertainty variables because it has the probabilistic constraints. In order to determine whether the probabilistic constraint is satisfied or not, simulation techniques and approximation methods are developed. In this paper, the reliability-based shape design optimization method is proposed by utilization the reliability index approach (RIA), performance measure approach (PMA), single-loop single-vector (SLSV), adaptive-loop (ADL) are adopted to evaluate the probabilistic constraint. In order to apply the ESO method to the RBSO, a sensitivity number is defined as the change of strain energy in the displacement constraint. Numerical examples are presented to compare the DO with the RBSO. The results of design example show that the RBSO model is more reliable than deterministic optimization.