Maximizing the Load Carrying Capacity of a Variable Stiffness Composite Cylinder Based on the Multi-Objective Optimization Method

Abstract

Variable stiffness (VS) composite structures can greatly increase the composite designability and thus have attracted much attention in recent years. This paper focuses on the maximization of load carrying capacity of VS composite cylinders under different loading cases, and the multi-objective optimization method is used to get the optimal results. First, the VS composite cylinder is optimized under four single loading cases. The results show that the anti-buckling capacity of the VS cylinder is better than the constant stiffness (CS) counterpart. The active learning Kriging surrogate model (AK) is applied to the cylinder optimization and the accuracy and efficiency of AK are verified. Under combined loading cases, the multi-objective particle swarm optimization is used to obtain the final Pareto-optimal solutions. The results indicate that the loading capacity of the VS cylinder is much greater than CS cylinder in the cases studied.