Food4Rhino

Abalone is a plug-in for Grasshopper used to optimise the geometry of perforations in simply-supported thin plates subject to buckling (under uniform compression). According to user-defined constraints, the 'buckling efficiency' is optimised using 'shape annealing', a rule-based optimisation procedure which implements stochasticity. A pool of candidate designs is generated by changing the random seed and 'cooling function'; the best result is a good indication of the global optimum. A mesh can be generated from this result to verify the predicted buckling efficiency using finite element analysis.