Why is my optimization failing?

Michael Kirby
Michael Kirby Altair Community Member
edited April 29 in Community Q&A

I am trying to run a stiffness optimization on a part using Altair Inspire.

 

Unfortunately, the optimizations have all failed. It is extremely frustrating to troubleshoot this problem, because the software does not tell me why the optimization failed, just to contact customer support.

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Answers

  • Jaideep Bangal_21041
    Jaideep Bangal_21041
    Altair Employee
    edited April 29

    Hello Michael,

    Please share this model with the Altair support team. You can send it through Altair Community' contact support, it will also enable you to track the support request, if required one of the team members can join webmeeting with you.

    Best regards,

    Jaideep Bangal

  • Ricardo Dominguez_22538
    Ricardo Dominguez_22538
    Altair Employee
    edited April 29

    Hi Michael!

    How are you doing?

    There are a few things that could be causing this error. Let's do a quick check:

    • Make sure you Run History Path is set to a local folder. You can check this on Preferences > Inspire: Run Options > Run History Path.
    • Defeature the design space. I notice that your design space contains multiple fillets and other design features, in order to avoid mesh issues, you can use Inspire Geometry tools to defeature the design space. You can check this video.
    • Solve part intersections. In your pictures I notice multiple non-design space parts are highly interecting with each other, this could be caused by creating Partitions with a very high radius or diameter, causing parts to intersect each other and driving mesh conflicts, please make sure no parts go into one another.
    • Use mesh controls and/or reduce mesh sizing. When running a topology optimization, you define a global mesh size when declaring thickness constraint (Minimum Thickness will be 3 time the element size), make sure you select a proper size that can capture your model's features. In order to use special mesh sizing for some feature, you can create mesh control, check how on this video.

    Topology optimization uses OptiStruct Solver, so best practices for FEA are also applicable for this workflow. Please try the above recommendations and let us know the output.

    Best,

    R.

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