Session: 01-04-01: Advances in Aerospace Structures

Paper Number: 133733

133733 - A General and Efficient High-Fidelity Design Tool for Advanced Tailorable Composites 

Affordable space explorations and innovative aircraft concepts require lightweight structural solutions with possible complex shapes. The use of composite materials is the de facto solution to lightweighting of aerospace structures such as hybrid/blended wing body, space launch vehicles, space habitats, etc. Most existing composites designs are limited to quasi-isotropic laminates made of unidirectional fiber-reinforced composites (UDFRCs) and cannot harness the full potential of advanced composite materials to produce highly tailorable designs with optimized load paths. Tailorable composites reinforced with long or short fibers have been proposed for lightweight aerospace structures for enhanced performance. However, there is no commercially available design tool for the design and analysis of advanced tailorable composite structures. This is because existing design tools were created especially for composite laminates consisting of straight fibers. Compared with UDFRC structures, the design and analysis of advanced tailorable composites possess the following features: 1) UDFRCs consist of straight and continuous fibers, while tailorable composites consist of continuous and/or discontinuous fibers whose orientations vary by location and result in location-dependent stiffness/strength. 2) The composite modeling modules of most existing commercial finite element tools are designed for UDFRCs and cannot not directly define location-dependent structural properties. 3) The fiber paths in advanced tailorable composites can be described by a series of design variables, making it possible to optimize structures under a complex loading and/or environmental conditions.

These features motivate us to develop a new efficient high-fidelity Design tool for Advanced Tailorable Composites (DATC), including the following components: a) Mechanics of structure genome (MSG): efficient high-fidelity modeling of advanced tailorable composites; b) A versatile parameterization method; c) An integrated design framework; d) A machine learning (ML) module integrated with the GUI plug-ins for developing efficient surrogate models. The basic framework has been developed in previous works.

The insufficiency of the basic framework is that it requires an explicit geometric description of the structure. This results in a limited capability such that it can only deal with relatively simple structures like plates and cylinders. In real engineering problems, simple mathematical expressions for surfaces may not be always available for different reasons: the surface is a result of a series Boolean operations, or the engineer does not have that information from the CAD group.

Hence, in this work, the following general design problem is considered. Assume that only structural meshing data is available including nodal coordinates in the global coordinates (X,Y,Z) (physical domain), element connectivity, etc. Geometric information is not available, such as radius of a cylinder or cone, size of a cutoff, or spline functions of a complex surface. However, for plate/shell-like structures, it is intuitive and meaningful to define spatially varying parameters with respect to the in-plane coordinate system (u,v) (parametric domain). The key step is the evaluation of specific layup design at a given location on the structure, which includes two sub-steps: i) mapping the nodal coordinates in the physical domain to the parametric domain, and ii) evaluate the distribution function within the parametric domain. This leads to the upgrade of the basic DATC framework by introducing the following two functional modules: general coordinate transformation and more versatile distribution functions.

Examples will be provided to demonstrate the updated capabilities of the design tool.

Presenting Author: Su Tian AnalySwift

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Su Tian received the PhD in aerospace engineering from Purdue University in 2022.
Currently, Dr. Tian holds the position of research scientist at AnalySwift, where his main work is in the development of tools for multiscale design optimization of advanced composite structures.