Design of an aircraft engine bracket using stress-constrained bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization method

This work improves our previous stress-constrained topology optimization method (Fan et al., in Struct Multidisc Optim 59:647–658, 2019) and provides an application of the improved method to a typical aircraft engine bracket design problem. The original method was built upon the bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) method with an extension to account for stress constraints. In this work, we first improve the method by means of a more efficient and versatile self-adaptive scheme for the determination of the Lagrange multiplier. The improved method is then applied for the design of a typical aircraft engine bracket considering multiple practical load conditions. The resulting bracket topology from stress-constrained design is further smoothed and detailed using basic CAD (Computer-Aided Design) primitives. Numerical results show that the reconstructed bracket design evidently outperforms than the original bracket design in terms of weight, stiffness, and strength.