OPTIMAL PLACEMENT OF DAMPED STRUTS USING SIMULATED ANNEALING

Presented is the optimization of the placement of damped structural elements in a two-dimensional truss network. This work presents a modification of a heuristic optimization technique called simulated annealing, to improve the speed of convergence. Rather than setting the annealing temperature schedule a priori, it is modified according to the change in cost functional. For a single mode of vibration, a comparison is made between the simulated-annealing results and the true optimal locations, as determined by the modal strain locations. As expected, simulated annealing returns a near-optimal solution from a variety of initial configurations. Modal weighting factors are utilized to examine multiple modes, and again the modal strain locations are used for comparison.