Effect of Steering Limit Constraints on the Performance of Variable Stiffness Laminates

Effect of Steering Limit Constraints on the Performance of Variable Stiffness Laminates

Peeters, D.M.J.
Abdalla, M.M.

Aerospace Engineering

Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics

2015-07-19

A method to optimise the fibre angle distribution of variable stiffness laminates is proposed. The proposed method integrates a fibre angle retrieval step with a fibre angle optimisation procedure. A multi-level approximation approach is used in combination with the method of successive approximations. First, fibre angle retrieval is done by approximating the structural responses based on the optimal stiffness distribution found using lamination parameters. The full fibre angle optimisation is done by updating the approximations based on the current stacking sequence. It is shown for a bucking optimisation with a stiffness constraint that the number of finite element analyses reduces significantly by starting the optimisation from the optimal stiffness distribution rather than from a user-specified stacking sequence. Next, it is shown that updating the approximations also leads to considerable improvements over fibre angle retrieval. Similar promising results are obtained for a stress optimisation problem.

optimisation
variable stiffness
lamination parameters
manufacturability

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1e04683e-9309-4f59-b451-4e33f95fe84b

ICCM

ICCM 20: 20th International Conference on Composite Materials, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-24 July 2015

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2015 The Author(s)