Prof Santiago Hernandez from the University of La Coruña, Spain, visited WIT to present a short course entitled Optimum Structural Design. Over a period of three days lectures were presented on the following topics:
- Fundamentals of Structural Optimization – Concepts. Problem formulation. Conditions of Kuhn-Tucker. Local and global optimization. Earlier works.
- Methods for Unconstrained Problems – Concept of search direction and step length. Zero order methods; first order methods; Newton methods.
- Methods for Constrained Problems - Penalty methods. Feasible direction methods. Dual methods. Approximation methods.
- Workshop on Numerical Optimization
- Size Optimization in Discrete and Continuum Structures
- Shape Optimization in Structural Design
- Sensitivity Analysis of Structural Responses - Displacements and stresses, eigen-frequencies and eigenvectors. Buckling loads.
- Review of Existing Software Packages
- Optimization of Concrete Structures
- Optimization of Steel Structures
- Optimization of Aluminium Structures
- Multi-Optimization – Concept of Pareto point. Current approaches. Sensitivity analysis in multi-objective optimization.
This course contained a comprehensive survey of the most efficient methods of numerical optimization techniques and a description of the main existing commercial packages of structural optimization. It also included several examples where general purpose packages and special purpose software were used.
Santiago Hernandez is a Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of La Coruna in Spain. He has conducted research on structural optimization since 1983 in his Spanish University, the University of Southampton (U.K.) and the University of California in Santa Barbara (USA). Professor Hernandez is the author or co-author of five books, editor of ten books on optimum structural design and has written more than sixty papers on that topic. Also he has developed software packages for structural optimization of concrete, steel and aluminium structures. He is a member of many scientific and technical committees and is the co-president of the international series of Conferences OPTI, started in 1989 and devoted to structural optimization.
Santiago Hernandez has been coordinator of European projects on intelligent methods in engineering design since 1991 and has organized courses and given lectures in several countries in Europe and USA. In 1995 he was awarded the Eminent Scientist prize by WIT.
Wessex Institute