Sensitivity analysis and optimisation of thermo-elasto-plastic process with applications to welding side heater design

摘要

A computational scheme is presented to optimize the design variables of the quasi-static weakly coupled thermo-elasto-plastic process in the three dimensional Lagrangian reference frame. Sensitivity formulations are developed using direct differentiation method. These formulations are used to optimize the dimensions of side heaters in the transient thermal tensioning welding process for minimum residual stress. The results of the direct sensitivity analysis are validated by comparing with those of the finite difference sensitivity analysis. Optimization is performed using the BFGS line search method.