Engineers are today faced with unprecedented design challenges and opportunities involving novel applications and new engineered materials. Often there is only a limited knowledge base available to guide these designs. Other than certain specialized concepts from optimization, a general and useful theoretical framework for design is lacking. A rigorous mechanics theory that is capable of identifying alternative global strategies for a complex problem would be very useful to design engineers. Some preliminary success had be forthcoming in an attempt to develop new theory and tools to help engineering discover such global design strategies. The design alternatives are generated by seeking a set of global design modification patterns which induce mutually orthogonal changes in the system response. Each orthogonal direction is termed a canonical design direction. This proposal requests support to continue to test the beams were based on the RITZ method and symbolic computation (MACSYMA). A finite element implementation of the method and explore its use in continuum problem will be developed. This work will include investigation of approaches to global optimization, optimization of topology, and visualization of design/response relations.
