Optimal thermal design of anisotropic plates with arbitrary cutouts using genetic algorithm

Anisotropic plates in different applications may have geometric defects such as openings and cracks. The presence of the opening disturbs the heat flow, which creates significant thermal stress around the open-ing. When the heat flux is high enough, these extreme stresses can lead to structural failure. This article aims to obtain the optimal parameters for achieving the minimum value of the normalized stress near the cutout's boundary in perforated anisotropic plates utilizing the genetic algorithm. Optimization parame-ters include the curvature of opening's corners, orientation angle of opening, fibers angle, heat flux angle, and opening's elongation. The plate is under heat flux, and the opening's border is thermally insulated. The stress distribution around the opening is calculated using Lekhnitskii's complex variable method and complex potential functions. The genetic algorithm is then implemented to find the optimal values for design parameters. The results show that by selecting the optimal parameters related to the anisotropic material and the opening's geometry, the stress intensity factor of the perforated anisotropic plates is remarkably reduced. Furthermore, this optimization algorithm can be extended to find the optimized pa-rameters and achieve the optimal designs in anisotropic and isotropic perforated plates under thermal loadings.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )