Thermoelastic topology optimization for structures with temperature-dependent material properties

A thermoelastic topology optimization is proposed for structures with temperature-dependent material properties.Different from the common assumption of constant material properties in traditional thermoelastic topology optimization,the temperaturedependent material properties related to mechanical and thermal fields are taken into account.The non-uniform temperature distribution of the structure is a design dependent field that may vary during the optimization,and the nonlinear heat transfer analysis is considered according to the large temperature gradient.Based on these,a thermoelastic topology optimization model considering temperature-dependent material properties is formulated.The sensitivities with respect to the design variables are derived and the Method of Moving Asymptotes(MMA)algorithm is used to update the topological design variables.A cooperation platform based on MATLAB and ABAQUS is developed for the proposed thermoelastic topology optimization method to deal with problems with arbitrary domains for the design of complex engineering structures.Several typical numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show the important influence of the temperaturedependent material properties.