You can choose to apply pressure to an entire surface, a concentrated load at any specific point on the design or torque on a surface or center of a hole. The first step is to set up your Load Case - Identify the Supports, and for this example, those will be the holes on the upper and lower portions of the geometry and apply your load. The initial design has a weight of 2.13 Lbs. In this scenario, my goal is to reduce the mass of my shelf bracket while maintaining the desired load, which is 50 lbf/in. I can create the initial design right inside of Inspire, so it’s not necessary for me to use a separate CAD or geometry creation tool prior to optimizing. With Inspire, it’s just a few simple steps to get to your optimized shape. Altair Inspire is a simple yet powerful tool for finding optimized designs. Thankfully, Altair has some of the most robust tools for this application. One topic we are hearing a lot about from our customers is the idea of Topology Optimization or Lightweighting design.

Altair inspire topology optimization