Print Email Facebook Twitter A floating connector element formulation for multi-level modelling of composite structures Title A floating connector element formulation for multi-level modelling of composite structures Author Kocaman, E. S. (Imperial College London) Chen, B. Y. (TU Delft Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics) Pinho, S. T. (Imperial College London) Date 2020 Abstract Design and optimisation of large structures, including the positioning of lower-level components, typically require extensive user involvement and sequential mechanical analysis/optimisation iterations. This paper presents an original method that enables adaptive positioning of lower-level models (such as components) within higher level-models (such as large structures), and that achieves a combined mechanical/optimisation problem for the design of structures with various hierarchical levels (such as the positioning of stiffeners within a wingbox). As the position of the lower-level model evolves, our proposed method does not require re-generating of the geometry, remeshing or modifying the stiffness matrix of the elements corresponding to the various hierarchical levels. Instead, we achieve the adaptive positioning via an original concept that we propose here: Floating Connector (FC) elements. In this paper, we validate the FC elements against reference purely-mechanical solutions, show that they can be combined with gradient-descent method and genetic algorithms, and that they can be applied to optimise the positioning of a stiffener runout taking into account a debonding manufacturing defect. Subject CompositesMulti-level modellingOptimizationStructural design To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1b8f6b60-2693-4c02-85e8-73c9ff683d9b DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2020.112532 Embargo date 2021-12-17 ISSN 0263-8223 Source Composite Structures, 251 Bibliographical note Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public. Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2020 E. S. Kocaman, B. Y. Chen, S. T. Pinho Files PDF 1_s2.0_S0263822320304402_main.pdf 2.93 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:1b8f6b60-2693-4c02-85e8-73c9ff683d9b/datastream/OBJ/view