Design of Fiber-steered Variable-stiffness Laminates Based on a Given Lamination Parameters Distribution

Mechanical properties of fiber-reinforced laminated composite materials are directionally dependent. Contemporary laminated composite design aims to make effective use of these directional properties by means of stacking sequence design, selecting the fiber orientation angle of each ply from a predefined set. Automated fiber-placement (AFP)...

Design of anisotropic composite shells using an isogeometric approach

Thin-walled composite structures, typically modeled as Cosserat continua during the design phase, are of particular importance in aerospace and automotive applications. At the dawn of industrial scale adoption of advanced fibre placement technology, it became viable to better exploit the directional properties of composite materials. In the...

Maximum Buckling Load Design of General Cross-section Cylinders Using Lamination Parameters

For a non-circular cylinder the radius of curvature changes around the circumference. Therefore for constant stiffness non-circular cylinders, some specific locations in the circumference are more prone to buckle. The same problem exists for circular cylinders with non-uniform loading in the cross-section like a cylinder under bending. This...

Tailoring for Strength of Steered-Fibre Composite Panels with Cutouts

The traditional approach to the problem of stress concentrations around cutouts in composite structures is to locally increase the laminate thickness in order to smooth out the stress peak. Often, this practice attracts more loads to the cutout region besides increasing part weight. A more effective solution is to avoid the stress concentrations...

Bending Test of a Variable-Stiffness Fiber-Reinforced Composite Cylinder

Two carbon-fiber-reinforced composite cylinders were tested in bending. One cylinder, the baseline cylinder, consisted of 0º, 90º and ±45º plies, whereas the other cylinder, called the variable-stiffness cylinder, contained plies with fiber orientations that varied in the circumferential direction, which caused a variation in laminate stiffness....