Generalized Bezier components and successive component refinement using moving morphable components

This paper demonstrates developments that introduce generalized Bezier components in the Moving Morphable Components (MMC) optimization framework. Methods of enhancing the parameterization of the components to provide the opportunity for a better optimum, than can be achieved using existing approaches, are also described. The use of control points and Bezier curves for representing structural components provides both additional flexibility in the shape and a parameterization that complies with extrude and swept feature-based templates available in commercial computer-aided design (CAD) packages. Methods of representing these structural components, calculating analytical derivatives, and numerical examples demonstrating their integration in the MMC framework, are presented for a series of author-derived and literature problems. A successive refinement technique demonstrates how the additional flexibility in the structural components enables progressive improvement in the objective function. For the examined problems, increasing the design variables per component (from 5 to 15) resulted in solutions with 6% to 36% reduction in compliance. This improvement was achieved without increasing the number of components in the design space.