The use of composite materials has grown exponentially in transport structures due to their weight reduction advantages, added to their capability to adapt the material properties and internal micro-structure to the requirements of the application. This flexibility allows the design of highly efficient composite structures that can reduce the environmental impact of transport, especially if the used composites are bio-based. In order to design highly efficient structures, the numerical models and tools used to predict the structural and material performance are of great importance. In the present paper, the authors propose a multi-objective, multi-scale optimization procedure aimed to obtain the best possible structure and material design for a given application. The procedure developed is applied to an aircraft secondary structure, an overhead locker, made with a sandwich laminate in which both, the skins and the core, are bio-materials. The structural multi-scale numerical model has been coupled with a Genetic Algorithm to perform the optimization of the structure design. Two optimization cases are presented. The first one consists of a single-objective optimization problem of the fibre alignment to improve the structural stiffness of the structure. The second optimization shows the advantages of using a multi-objective and multi-scale optimization approach. In this last case, the first objective function corresponds to the shelf stiffness, and the second objective function consists of minimizing the number of fibres placed in one of the woven directions, looking for a reduction in the material cost and weight. The obtained results with both optimization cases have proved the capability of the software developed to obtain an optimal design of composite structures, and the need to consider both, the macro-structural and the micro-structural configuration of the composite, in order to obtain the best possible solution. The presented approach allows to perform the optimisation of both the macro-structural and the micro-structural configurations.
The aim of this work is to describe the structural analysis of a multifunctional aircraft fuselage panel. The structure of the panel has an embedded antenna tiles. The panel consists of UniDirectional (UD) carbon fibre reinforced composite skin stiffened with ortho-grid ribs, and a transparent skin window made using UD glass fibre reinforced composite. The orthogrid structure is a structural reinforcement but also the antenna tiles support. The presented work proposes a numerical multiscale strategy. The laminate is simulated with solid elements, in order to capture the real kinematics of the material, but several laminas are condensed in a single finite element. The performance of each lamina is obtained using the Serial-Parallel (SP) mixing theory. The specific formulations developed have been very useful to identify and study the mechanical performance of these new structures and the localization of unknown and un-predicted hot-spots in the structure.
Marine structures made with composite materials, such as ship hulls or decks, contain discontinuities in the form of stiffeners and connections that affect the global stiffness and strength of the structure. The large dimensions and the morphology of these structures makes necessary to solve them with shell finite elements, which kinematics neither allows a detailed characterization of the existing discontinuities in the composite, nor an accurate evaluation of their contribution to the global performance of the structure. In addition, connections and stiffeners usually suffer from stress concentrations that can result in fatigue failures, being necessary the correct evaluation of their stress fields due to the global loads applied to the structure in order to evaluate this failure case.
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