Download or read book Optimal Structural Design written by Ronald A. Gellatly and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The report considers the state of the art in methods of structural optimization. Mathematical programming based methods, while extremely successful with problems of moderate size tend to become prohibitively costly when applied to large scale structures. A novel approach to the weight optimization of indeterminate structures under multiple loading conditions with strength and displacement constraints has been developed and is presented herein. Using this method significant improvements in computational time have been achieved over direct numerical search methods. In some cases the numbers of iterations required to determine the least weight have been reduced by factors of over 20. The rate of convergence is independent of problem size permitting application to large scale structures. Examples of application of the new approach to a number of problems are included.