Material orientation optimisation of finite deformable orthotropic thin-shells

Abstract

This paper presents an energy based method of stochastic optimisation for orthotropic material orientation of finite deformable thin-shells. A closed form equation expressing the 3-dimensional orthotropic material parameters in any given spatial direction is derived to avoid using tedious tensor algebra on material models. This generalised material model is subsequently used in a stochastic nonlinear optimisation scheme to minimise the strain energy with respect to the material orientations. Illustrative examples are presented to showcase the numerical convergence and accuracy of the proposed method.