A new approach for generating stress-constrained topological designs incontinua is presented. The main novelty is in the use of elasto-plasticmodeling and in optimizing the design such that it will exhibit alinear-elastic response. This is achieved by imposing a single globalconstraint on the total sum of equivalent plastic strains, providing accuratecontrol over all local stress violations. The single constraint essentiallyreplaces a large number of local stress constraints or an approximateaggregation of them--two common approaches in the literature. A classicalrate-independent plasticity model is utilized, for which analytical adjointsensitivity analysis is derived and verified. Several examples demonstrate thecapability of the computational procedure to generate designs that challengeresults from the literature, in terms of the obtained stiffness-strength-weighttrade-offs. A full elasto-plastic analysis of the optimized designs shows thatprior to the initial yielding, these designs can sustain significantly higherloads than minimum compliance topological layouts, with only a minor compromiseon stiffness.
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