An evaluative study on ESO and SIMP for optimising a cantilever tie-beam

We examine both the Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (ESO) and Solid Isotropic Microstructure with Penalisation (SIMP) methodologies by investigating a cantilever tie-beam. Initially, both ESO and SIMP produce designs with higher objective function values relative to a previously published ‘intuitive’ design. However, after careful investigation of the numerical parameters such as the initial design domain and the mesh-size, both methods obtain designs which have lower objective function values relative to the intuitive design. Thus a clearer understanding for the numerical parameters and their influence on optimisation methods is achieved.