Optimal Design of Layered Structures Under Normal (Frictionless) Contact Loading

A methodology is presented for the optimization of a tribological contact configuration, namely, a multi-layered elastic structure under normal (frictionless) point contact loading. This work is aimed at developing an algorithm by which the finite element (FE) mesh and the corresponding structure may be generated automatically for each variation in the vector of design variables during optimization iterations. The FE model for contact analysis may be developed in a given commercial solver such as ABAQUS or ANSYS. To do this, a flexible mesh generator, which interfaces with the FE model and the optimizer, was developed. The optimization scheme is implemented using a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm as the optimizer with an axisymmetric (point contact) FE indentation model in the commercial finite element solver ABAQUS. The results suggest that conventional optimization methods may be employed to examine the design of tribological contact configurations such as multi-layered structures, working seamlessly within the operating system shell (e.g., Unix), and the finite element solver.