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 that have lower objective function values relative to the intuitive design. Thus, a clearer understanding of the numerical parameters and their influence on optimisation methods is achieved.