Closing the gap towards super-long suspension bridges using computational morphogenesis

Abstract

Girder design for suspension bridges has remained largely unchanged for the past 60 years. However, for future super-long bridges, aiming at record-breaking spans beyond 3 km, the girder weight is a limiting factor. Here we report on a design concept, inspired by computational morphogenesis procedures, demonstrating possible weight savings in excess of 28 percent while maintaining manufacturability. Although morphogenesis procedures are rarely used in civil engineering, often due to complicated designs, we demonstrate that even a crude extraction of the main features of the optimized design, followed by a simple parametric optimization, results in hitherto unseen weight reductions. We expect that further studies of the proposed design, as well as applications to other structures, will lead to even greater weight savings and reductions in carbon footprint in a construction industry, currently responsible for 39 percent of the world's CO 2 emissions.

Efficient stress‐constrained topology optimization using inexact design sensitivities

“…Manufacturing processes have also progressed and can realize optimized designs with complex geometries. Consequently, topology optimization is pushed toward ultra‐high computational resolution so that novel design concepts can be found that bring significant weight reduction and excellent structural performance 1,2 . This trend creates a growing interest in efficient computational schemes that can generate high‐resolution optimized designs using reasonable computational cost.…”

Topology Optimisation in Structural Steel Design for Additive Manufacturing

“…Within this subject, one can mention the Topology Optimisation of domes through a Colliding Bodies Optimisation (CBO) method by Kaveh [417] and the general space-frame steel roof optimisation method with Genetic Algorithms by Kociecki and Adeli [265]. Concerning bridge engineering, the spotlight is in the DTU TO group steel girder optimisation for super-long suspended spans, employing computational morphogenesis [418] (Figure 10).…”

“…Within this subject, one can mention the Topology Optimisation of domes through a Colliding Bodies Optimisation (CBO) method by Kaveh [417] and the general space-frame steel roof optimisation method with Genetic Algorithms by Kociecki and Adeli [265]. Concerning bridge engineering, the spotlight is in the DTU TO group steel girder optimisation for super-long suspended spans, employing computational morphogenesis [418] (Figure 10). As steel design and detailing is deeply affected by fabrication and erection procedures, which usually constrain engineering options in a more extensive manner compared to construction with other common materials, a further investigation into recent research papers devoted to considering such aspects into TO is due.…”

“…Super-long suspended spans optimisation with computational morphogenesis. (a) Case-study initial (blue) and interpreted (red) design[418] and (b) computational morphogenesis result[418]; (reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ accessed on 25 February 2021).…”

Topology optimization using PETSc: a Python wrapper and extended functionality

“…Examples of these high-performance computing TO codes are the 'Topology optimization using PETSc' framework (Aage et al 2015), the parallel TO frameworks (Kennedy and Martins 2014;Chin et al 2019;Wu et al 2016;Liu et al 2018) and the 'Topology optimization in OpenMDAO' framework (Chung et al 2019). The framework by Aage et al (2015) is state of the art, capable of handling ultra highresolution problems with more than two billion elements (Amir et al 2017;Baandrup et al 2020) and uses the PETSc library to handle the parallel linear algebra (Balay et al 1997(Balay et al , 2019(Balay et al , 2020.…”