Optimal steered fiber paths for maximizing biaxial buckling load of a flat plate manufactured using AFP

摘要

Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) technology has revolutionized composites manufacturing and is replacing traditional hand-layups. Among others, the notable advantage of AFP is that the designer is not restricted to the use of straight fibers. This makes it possible to have fiber paths designed for optimizing specific structural performance indices. The scope of this work is to identify the manufacturing parameters and associated constraints imposed by these parameters on the mathematical design space and introduce this to an optimization problem to maximize the critical buckling load of a flat square plate under 2 : 1 biaxial in-plane compressive loading. Therefore, this work explicitly accounts for gaps and overlaps that cannot be avoided in AFP manufacturing.