FAIRING AND CONFIGURATION OPTIMIZATION METHOD OF FREE-FORM SPACE GRID STRUCTURES BASED ON ENERGY METHOD
The thorough study on the fairing and configuration optimization of free-form space grid structures is presented.Combined with mapping technology of bicubic quasi-uniform B-spline surfaces,the energy method is introduced to smooth free-form space grid structures through a fairing factor adjustment,and the effects of a fairing factor on morphological characteristics of a grid structure are investigated.On this basis,the fairing factor is set as the design variable,and the multi-objective optimum function,whose objective variables are the quality factor of a grid form,the tolerance of elements length,and the characteristic of Gaussian curvature,is proposed.The optimum configuration of a space grid structure is finally achieved from the solution of a multi-objective optimum function,and the nature of the optimum process is interpreted by the solution space.The analyses of several free-form surface grid structures verify the practicality and reliability of the method discussed in the paper.