control polygon

Towards adaptation of the NURBS weights in shape optimization

Bézier based parametrisations in shape optimization have the drawback of using high degree polynomials to draw more complex shapes.  To overcome this drawback, Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) are usually used.  But, by considering the NURBS weights, in addition to the locations of the control points, as optimization variables, the dimension of the problem greatly increases and this would make the optimization process stiffer.  In this work we propose, then, an algorithm to adapt the weights of NURBS in the parametrization of shape optimization problems.  Unlike t