Profiles of minimum stress concentration for antiplane deformation of an elastic solid (Q1063442)

In this work the authors formulated the optimization problem of stress concentration for states of antiplane deformation and established the conditions under which it can be rigorously solved by recourse to an inverse problem analogous to the free streamline problems of classical hydrodynamics. To this end they first considered the antiplane shear deformation of an elastic cylindrical region of infinite extent and reduced the problem to the solution of Neumann problem in two dimension. Then by introducing a conjugate function they showed that the problem may be reduced to a Dirichlet problem in two dimensions. In the particular optimization problem they studied, the boundary is partitioned into two complementary parts consisting of a fixed part along which the traction is given and a traction free part which is variable. The form of this variable part is sought so as to minimize the stress concentration. This idea lead them to the Min-Max principle of Garabedian and Spencer. This work may be of value to those researchers working on structural optimization.