Lightweight design of variable-angle filament-wound cylinders combining Kriging-based metamodels with particle swarm optimization

Variable-angle filament-wound (VAFW) cylinders are herein optimized for minimum mass under manufacturing constraints, and for various design loads. A design parameterization based on a second-order polynomial variation of the tow winding angle along the axial direction of the cylinders is utilized to explore the nonlinear steering-thickness...

Measuring geometric imperfections of variable–angle filament–wound cylinders with a simple digital image correlation setup

Measuring the geometric imperfections in cylindrical shells is a critical step necessary to create accurate numerical models that can capture the imperfection-sensitive behavior of these structures. Modern composite structures, such as variable–angle filament–wound (VAFW) cylinders, have a unique imperfection signature that is still unknown to...

Design, modeling, optimization, manufacturing and testing of variable-angle filament-wound cylinders

This work demonstrates the potential of manufacturing variable-angle composite cylinders via filament winding (FW), called VAFW. The proposed design strategy allows different filament angles along the axial direction by dividing the cylinder into regions of constant angle called frames. Designs using two, four, or eight frames are herein...

Reliability-based buckling optimization with an accelerated Kriging metamodel for filament-wound variable angle tow composite cylinders

A reliability-based optimization framework is introduced and used to design filament-wound cylindrical shells with variable angle tow. Seven design cases are investigated to enable a comparison between constant-stiffness and variable angle tow designs, also considering effects of thickness variation created due to overlapping tow paths,...