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Creating models of truss structures with optimization

Published:01 July 2002Publication History

ABSTRACT

We present a method for designing truss structures, a common and complex category of buildings, using non-linear optimization. Truss structures are ubiquitous in the industrialized world, appearing as bridges, towers, roof supports and building exoskeletons, yet are complex enough that modeling them by hand is time consuming and tedious. We represent trusses as a set of rigid bars connected by pin joints, which may change location during optimization. By including the location of the joints as well as the strength of individual beams in our design variables, we can simultaneously optimize the geometry and the mass of structures. We present the details of our technique together with examples illustrating its use, including comparisons with real structures.

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              cover image ACM Conferences
              SIGGRAPH '02: Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
              July 2002
              574 pages
              ISBN:1581135211
              DOI:10.1145/566570

              Copyright © 2002 ACM

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              • Published: 1 July 2002

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              SIGGRAPH '02 Paper Acceptance Rate67of358submissions,19%Overall Acceptance Rate1,822of8,601submissions,21%

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