• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.19 no.1 s.71
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• pp.47-54
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• 2006

In this study, an optimum support design problem is considered to minimize displacement of stacked plates under self weight condition. During the displacement analysis, several kinds of contact arise between the plates themselves and support bar. These can be easily considered if commercial analysis software, which provides capability to solve the contact problem, is used. It is found, however, that the computing time is extraordinarily long due possibly to the generality of the software and also to the ignorance of the control parameters used in the software. In this paper, the contact condition is imposed directly by the authors, while the software is used only to solve the ordinary displacement analysis problem. In this way, the computing time is decreased remarkably by more than 30 times, while yielding the same accurate results. Optimization is conducted based on this efficient analysis method to find minimum number of supporting bars using the response surface algorithm.