Author(s)

C. Alessandri & A. Tralli

Abstract

In recent years a number of papers have been devoted to the mathematical foun- dation of sensitivity analysis of structures in the presence of unilateral constraints. Classical variational formulations, such as the ones based on the total potential energy, and their discretisation by means of finite element models have been widely used. On the contrary, in this paper a sensitivity analysis based on "boundary" variational formulations is proposed. It allows to retain most of the mathematical results obtained until now and, at the same time, it takes ad- vantage of a discretisation carried out with Boundary Element Techniques which appear to be more suited to this type of problem. 1 Introduction In recent years a considerable effort has been devoted to determine variations occurring in the behaviour of mec

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