• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.67-74
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• 2007

The unsymmetrically layered artificial material model is consistently introduced to find the optimum topologies of the plate structures. Reissner-Mindlin (RM) plate theory is adopted to formulate the present 9-node plate element considering the first-order shear deformation of the plates. In the topology optimization process, the strain energy to be minimized is employed as the objective function and the initial volume of structures is adopted as the constraint function. In addition, the resizing algorithm based on the optimality criteria is used to update the hole size introduced in the proposed artificial material model. Several numerical examples are rallied out to investigate the performance of the proposed technique. From numerical results, the proposed topology optimization techniques are found to be very effective to produce the optimum topology of plate structures. In particular, the proposed unsymmetric stiffening layer model make it possible to produce more realistic stiffener design of the plate structures.