Explorative structural design

The thesis proposes a new way of thinking about structural design software. The current state of computational structural design in practice is assessed, and a review of relevant literature and existing software identifies both the strengths of existing approaches and areas in which contributions can be made. A new approach is proposed which combines the strengths of architectural modeling software with structural analysis software, and an original object-oriented framework for the development of next-generation structural design tools is presented. The thesis shows that the field of structural optimization, long maligned by engineers for its impracticalities for engineering practice, can be made relevant and beneficial in providing techniques to explore the design space in an optimally-directed way, leading to the discovery of unexpected and novel structural designs which are easier to build, use less material, and cost less than structures designed by conventional software. The software framework is extended to include these optimization components and to facilitate the future inclusion of new algorithms by users. A fully functional design environment is developed and presented as an implementation of the work of the thesis.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Clune, Rory P. (Rory Patrick)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jerome J. Connor and John A. Ochsendorf.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/60798

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/60798