Exploration of commercial optimizers for non-traditional laminate optimization

摘要

A significant advantage of composite laminates over conventional material is the ability to directionally tailor material properties to improve performance or reduce weight. However, in industrial practice, the fiber angles in a laminate are limited to four fiber orientation 0°, +/- 45° and 90°, due to the dearth of analysis methods and design rules. Exploring and expanding analysis methods and design rules provides the opportunity to enlarge the design space and potential for weight savings. Often, for a specific load case, more than one feasible composite configuration (combination of various ply thicknesses and fiber orientations) exists. An effective method to identify an optimal configuration would be the use of mathematical optimization algorithms embedded in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software: structural optimization. The focus of the reported work is to demonstrate the potential benefits of using non-traditional laminates and also to explore the capabilities of Nastran (MSC Software Corporation) SOL 200 and OptiStruct® (Altair®) solvers towards composite optimization. The performance of the solvers was studied for various parameters such as, influence of design optimization settings, I/O transfers, memory allocation, series and parallel computing. It was observed that OptiStruct converges to good optimum design solutions while MSC Nastran gives good control over the design optimization settings.