Optimum Design of Solar Sandwich Panels for Satellites Applications

Abstract

The aim of the article was to verify the optimum design of solar sandwich panels for microsatellites applications. The sandwich panel consists of aluminum honeycomb core and aluminum materials facesheets. In this study, a methodology for a combined weight and/or cost optimization for sandwich panel with aluminum facesheets and honeycomb core is presented. The fmincon Solver Constrained Nonlinear Minimization/Interior Point Algorithm was used to solve the single objective function the weight or the cost of the honeycomb sandwich panel. The Multiobjective optimization technique was applied to minimize the weight and the cost of the sandwich panel included the Weighted Normalized Method with Excel Solver program and Genetic Algorithm Solver with Pareto front in Matlab program. The weight and/or the cost of the sandwich panel are the objective functions subjected to required constraints based on total stiffness (bending and shear stiffness), total deflection (bending and shear deflection), facing skin stress (bending load), core shear stress, facing skin stress (end loading), overall panel buckling (critical bending and shear buckling load), shear crimping load, skin wrinkling (critical stress and load) and intracell buckling (facesheet dimpling). The design variables are thicknesses of core and facesheets. The use of sandwich construction results in light structure.