Mass Target

The Mass Target option is an alternative optimisation constraint that overrules the usual approach based on a stress goal. The optimisation attempts to reach a user specified global target mass. However, locally the design will still be a stress driven one, meaning regions with low and high stresses will be avoided as good as possible.

Please consider that the stress goal (respectively tensile strength and safety factor) still have to be set to a meaningful value. It will be used to calculate and display the local optimization achievement. However the amount of stress or local optimization achievement will rather be a simulation output than an input.

In order to set the Mass Target two different approaches can be chosen. Either an absolute or an relative Mass Target can be set. If an absolute approach is chosen the desired can be set directly using world units. In case a relative approach is chosen the Mass Target needs to be set between 0 & 1 where 0 corresponds to 0% and 1 to 100%.

In the picture below the relative actual mass and the relative mass target for an optimisation run through of the GD-Bracket is shown.