Abstract
Composite structures play an important role in realising resource-efficient products. Their high lightweight potential and improved manufacturing technologies lead to an increased use in high-volume products. However, especially during the design and development of high-volume products, the consideration of uncertainties is essential to guarantee the final product quality. In this context, the use of modern lightweight materials, such as fibre reinforced plastics (FRP), leads to new challenges. This is due to their high number of design parameters, which are subject to deviations from their nominal values. Deviating parameters, e.g. ply angles and thicknesses, influence the manufacturing process as well as the structural behaviour of a composite part. To consider the deviating design parameters during the design process, a new tolerance optimisation approach is presented, defining tolerance values for laminate design parameters, while ensuring the functionality of the composite structure. To reduce the computational effort, metamodels are used during this optimisation to replace finite element simulations. The proposed approach is applied to a use case with different key functions to show its applicability and benefits.
Highlights
Composite materials, especially endless fibre reinforced plastics, show a high lightweight potential
Since tolerance optimisation often needs an high amount of simulations, e.g. FE-simulations, surrogate models, in the following depicted as metamodels, can be used to decrease the high computational effort [44]
An extensive review on the use of metamodels to predict the structural behaviour of composite structures can be found in [45] by DEY et al They review several metamodels, e.g. polynomial regression or response surface method, radial basis functions and support vector machines, on their precision compared to finite element analyses (FEA) results as well as on their computational effort
Summary
Especially endless fibre reinforced plastics, show a high lightweight potential. They are used in high-tech applications, requiring outstanding structural performance at minimum weight. While many applications aim at products with low volumes, modern design tools, exemplarily presented in [1,2,3,4,5], simplify the design process of complex composite parts. The second chapter begins with an introduction to uncertainty quantification in composite structures with a focus on design parameters, followed by an overview of tolerance management and optimisation in the context of endless fibre reinforced plastics. The novel method with the aim of optimising tolerances for laminate design parameters is presented.
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