Optimising building structural topologies

A strategy to perform structural optimisation at early stages of the building design process has been developed. It uses a complete building spatial design as input to generate astructural topology. The latter is converted into a building structural design and a corresponding finite element model. After that, topology optimisation is used to generate an optimal finite element model, which shows an optimal distribution of the finite elements’ relative densities. The optimal finite element models can be used to generate several different and possibly better-performing structural topologies. Examples of two variants (A and B) of the strategy are presented. Strategy variant A uses walls as load-bearing architectural elements, whereas strategy variant B uses bricks (solids) to generate a structural topology. Results show that strategy variant A generates optimal relative density distributions that resemble recognizable structural elements. Also, the structural topologies found are in concordance with the initial building spatial design. On the other hand, strategy variant B is only partly influenced by the initial building spatial design and the resulting optimal relative densities distributions are mainly determined by the prescribed constraints and loads.