Development of a Technique for Design and Optimization of the Bearing Structure of a Strapdown Inertial Navigation System

The paper describes a technique for designing and optimizing the bearing structure of a strapdown inertial navigation system aiming to reduce the instrumental errors of sensors caused by the deformation of the bearing structure under the complex action of an external and internal loads considering the mass minimization of an inertial measurement unit at the same time. In order to solve current tasks an algorithm that combines multi-objective parametric optimization and structural topological optimization was developed. As an illustration of the described technique application, the process of optimizing the bearing structure of a particular device of a strapdown inertial navigation system was considered. Two-stage multi-objective parametric optimization was performed in order to maximize the stiffness of the structure, and then, using topological optimization, the mass of parts was minimized. It was shown that the proposed combination of parametric and topological design optimization techniques allows us to switch from multi-objective optimization to single-objective optimization with the assumption of insignificant change of stiffness.