Stacking Design of Composite Laminate in Wheelchair Structure under Seat Loading

Abstract

For designing the wheelchair structure under the seat loading, the stresses and failure indexes in each ply of the composite laminate are obtained by the finite element analysis. Using the Tsai-Wu criterion and delamination criterion, the stacking sequence [04/904/454/-45]sis the final optimal design for the wheelchair frame. On the contrary, the uni-directional laminates, i.e. [9013] s, [4513] s and [-4513] s, are bad designs.