Abstract
Sandwich composite panels are increasingly used in the construction of marine vehicles because of their outstanding strength, stiffness and light weight properties. However, the use of composite panels comes with difficulties in the design process as a result of the large number of design variables involved, including composite material design, topologies and laminate schemes. Hence, this work deals with the presentation of an optimal design of laminated composite sandwich marine structures subjected to underwater explosion. The optimization process is performed using a genetic algorithm (GA), associated with the finite element method (FEM) for the structural analysis. In this optimization procedure, sandwich composite panel finite element model is built up, then the coupled acoustic–structural arithmetic from the widely used calculation program of the finite element “ABAQUS” is used to simulate and analyze the transient dynamic response of a sandwich composite panel that experiences loading by an acoustic pressure shock wave resulting from an underwater explosion “UNDEX”. This approach is well suited for enhancing the response of orthotropic and/or laminated composites which involve many design variables. In GA method, a new approach is considered to improve this evolutionary algorithm for laminated stacking sequence and material selection of face layer and cores. Simple crossover, modified ply mutation, and a new operator called “ply swap” are applied to achieve these goals.
Highlights
Sandwich structures by definition are made of two thin faces with high stiffness and high strength and a core with low density and low stiffness
A technique for combining genetic algorithms with the finite element method to minimize the weight of sandwich panel with laminated composite facesheets with several design variables is described in this paper
The genetic algorithm (GA) was successfully applied to obtain the optimal design of sandwich panels
Summary
Sandwich structures by definition are made of two thin faces with high stiffness and high strength and a core with low density and low stiffness. The earlier works in the field of composite structures optimization employed the same methods already used to optimize conventional material structures These methods are based on gradients of the objective and constraints functions with respect to the design variables, which are considered to be continuous in the design space. Many researchers have proposed modifications to the classical GA structure to take advantage of composite laminate characteristics and minimize the computational cost Some of these new strategies are applied in this work, consisting essentially of a GA restructuring of the variable codification and the genetic operators. In the present work an example of optimization of sandwich composite panels using parallel computing between the FEA and a developed genetic algorithm are studied This approach is well suited for enhancing the response of orthotropic and/ or laminated composites which involve many design variables. The optimized stacking sequence of facesheets, the number of plies, fiber orientations and core thickness are determined by varying the ply angles and core thickness in order to achieve the minimum weight
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