Yan Feng, Zongsheng Xu, Linfeng Dan, Yufang Lin, Xinyu Pei, and Xiongfeng Huang
Intelligent cable seeker, topology optimisation, control-based optimisation approach, continuation strategy
The intelligent cable seeker is a device to drag the cable forward in underground cable pipelines, which will reflect the pipeline environment and working status. To meet the requirements of large pulling force and high structural strength, selecting titanium alloy as the production material will lead to increased costs and large mass. Therefore, a finite element model for the seeker is established and the density value is used to represent the state of the unit material. A topology optimisation method for the cable seeker structure is proposed to reduce mass while ensuring structural strength. In addition, a PID controller is introduced to make the density of each unit approach the optimal value of the optimisation objective and accelerate the iterative update process. When the optimisation method is applied to topology optimisation, a penalty function is employed to address gray elements, and a continuation strategy is adopted to determine a reasonable value of the penalty factor to solve the local optimal problem. The simulation demonstrates that in the structural design of an intelligent seeker, the mass is reduced by 30% while ensuring the device strength and the optimisation speed is increased by 29.4%. This method can reduce material wastage and improve economic efficiency.
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