Optimal design of Kirchhoff-Love plates under the low contrast assumption

Abstract

A method for the optimization of the distribution of two materials in a thin symmetric plate is presented. The model for the plate is the Kirchhoff-Love and the optimization method is based on the small amplitude, or low contrast, approximation for homogenization. Numerical results are presented for compliance minimization, i.e., maximizing the global stiffness of the plate, and for minimizing the integral of an even power of the deflection in a subset of the plate. The method arrives at classical designs without the need of penalization, which allows evaluating the exact performance of the proposed shapes and the comparison with some simple intuitive designs. This also gives insight in how small the contrast needs to be for the method to give designs which are better than some intuitive designs.