Abstract
The trend of power transformer is large capacity and high voltage. This leads to the increase of the transformer's size and weight, and meets with other problems such as limitations from transportation. Thus, the demand for the lightweight design is in urgent. This paper presents a development of lightweight design of the shell type transformer's tank by structural optimization. Both an optimality criteria technique and genetic algorithms are used in order to perform optimization efficiently. It is shown that the weight is reduced up to 15% while the strength request is ensured in the optimum design compared with in the original design by use of these techniques, which indicates that these techniques are effective in the lightweight design of the shell type transformer's tank.
