Modeling hybrid polymer–nanometal lightweight structures

Abstract

Increasing the environmental sustainability of aviation is a key design goal for commercial aircraft for the foreseeable future. From the perspective of structural engineering, this is accomplished through reducing the mass of aircraft components and structures. Advanced manufacturing techniques offer new avenues for design, enabling more complex structures which can have highly tailored properties. One advanced manufacturing concept is the use of 3D printed polymer preforms that are coated with nanocrystalline metal through electrodeposition. This enables the use of high-performance materials in virtually any geometry. To exploit this manufacturing approach, it is incumbent to have well-established mechanical models of the behavior of such hybrid structures. In particular, hybrid polymer–nanometal structures tend to fail due to compressive instabilities. This paper describes a model of local shell buckling, a typical compressive instability, as it applies to hybrid polymer–nanometal structures. The analysis depends upon the Southwell stress function model for radially loaded solids of rotation, and couples this with the Timoshenko analysis of local shell buckling. This combination is applicable to a range of practical configurations for truss-like hybrid structures.