Aeroelastic Design of Blended Composite Structures Using Lamination Parameters

Abstract

The design of composite structures based on fiber angle optimization rapidly becomes intractable as the number of design variables increases. Lamination parameters can be used as intermediate design variables to overcome this issue. An extra step is then required to convert optimal designs expressed in lamination parameters into feasible blended stacking sequences. However, disparities between the lamination parameter and stacking sequence designs performance are generally observed due to discrepancies between both design spaces. In this paper, the lamination parameter blending constraints recently proposed by the authors are applied to the aeroelastic design of the common research wing model to diminish these discrepancies and achieve more realistic lamination parameter designs. A comparison between the optimized designs achieved with and without the proposed blending constraints is carried out to evaluate this approach. Results demonstrate that the application of blending constraints greatly increases the matching quality between lamination parameter and stacking sequence designs, consequently facilitating the retrieval of equivalent blended stacking sequences.