A new procedure for aerodynamic missile designs using topological optimization approach of continuum structures

This paper presents a multi-objective programming scheme for the conceptual design of aerodynamic missile's structure using topological optimization approaches, in which both the compliance and eigenfrequency are regarded as static and dynamic optimization objectives, respectively. During the conceptual design of the aerodynamic missile with multiple loadings, both the multilevel sequential programming approach and the compromising programming method are coupled together to settle the associated difficulties when the whole structure of the missile body is considered as a pre-defined design domain. The compromise programming method is first applied to describe the statically loaded multi-stiffness topology optimization, and the dynamic formulation is used to establish the subsequent optimization problem mainly concerned with free vibration. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is the flexibility of dealing with optimal topology designs for the whole structures of aerodynamic missiles with complicated loading cases. Solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) is used as the interpolation scheme to indicate the dependence of material modulus upon regularized element densities. The sequential convex programming approach is applied to solve the optimization problem. An engineering application is used to demonstrate the characteristics of the presented methodologies based on the commercial software package of Hyperworks.OptiStruct at Altair®.