Design of component structure in assemblies for simultaneously regulating contact pressure distribution and natural frequencies

Contact behavior always plays a vital role on the performance and service life of assembly. In this paper, focusing on the structures under frictionless contact condition, a topology optimization method is developed to regulate the contact pressure distribution and natural frequencies simultaneously. More specifically, flattening the contact pressure distribution and increasing the natural frequencies are the purpose of regulating them in our work. The performance of contact pressure distribution is quantified by the variance of the contact pressure field. A node-to-node contact theory is employed to perform the finite element analysis (FEA). Based on the three-field solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) method, two alternative optimization forms with different objective functions and constraints, are presented. Sensitivities of the contact pressure's variance and natural frequencies with regard to design variables are obtained in accordance with the equilibrium equations of the contact behavior and the modal analysis. A typical elastic-to-elastic contact model is created to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.