A simple approach towards fully stressed design in hyperelasticity exploiting the isoparametric finite element concept

A novel approach towards fully stressed designs in hyperelasticity is discussed leading to closed‐form expressions for the sensitivities of the objective and displacements with respect to design variations. The key idea is the modification of the classical approach coupled with a so‐called design element method offering a lot of parallelism to standard finite element methods. We bypass implicit constraints on dependent quantities and derive an explicit linearly constrained optimization problem solved by means of first‐order procedures. The results obtained with the proposed method are adequate from an engineering point of view though being computed with a simple method. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.