Otimização estrutural de pórticos espaciais de aço via algoritmos de evolução diferencial

Abstract

Spatial steel frames are structural systems widely applied in the most diverse branches of civil engineering. Common applications of this type of structure are found in residential and commercial buildings, industrial sheds, warehouses, airports, hospitals, cultural centers such as museums, sports stadiums, among others. In taller buildings, factors such as horizontal displacements due to wind loads, natural frequencies of vibration, and global stability become more relevant. With the advancement of engineering, the need for increasingly competitive and optimized projects emerged, arousing the search for computational methodologies capable of solving such problems. In the last decades, meta-heuristics have proven increasing efficiency and robustness in solving problems of this nature. This dissertation makes a study of structural optimization via differential evolution algorithms applied to spatial steel frames, having as an innovative point the addition of constraints related to the dynamic behavior and the global stability of the structure, in general neglected. Three sets of experiments are conducted, in which analyses of braced and unbraced structural systems, as well as studies for cardinality constraints and automatic member grouping, are taken into account in the steel frames optimization problems.