Striving to improve structural efficiency the aerospace industry shows increasing interest in variable-stiffness composite laminates. Advanced fiber placement is a hybrid manufacturing technique that offers the flexibility of both filament winding and automated tape laying. With the development of this novel system curved tows can be placed and a spatially variable-stiffness laminate can be designed with continuous changing stiffness from point to point.

The increased design freedom to tailor a structure by in-plane stiffness variation leads to a challenging design optimization problem. A multi-step framework is developed by the aerospace structures and materials department to optimize variable-stiffness laminates. Variable-stiffness laminate design allows for sophisticated designs. Based on this premise it is investigated how such design could improve the structural performance of an engine thrust frame, a structural application that transfers the thrust loads from the rocket engine to the rest of the launch system. The engine thrust frame is subject to cryogenic thermal loads, something not incorporated in the available optimization framework. The goal of this work is to add thermal loads to the laminate analysis routine and to adjust the optimization routine to incorporate thermal influences.

With the thermomechanical optimization framework in place the engine thrust frame is modeled. Conceptual design optimization of the engine thrust frame under thermomechanical loads is performed to increase buckling resistance. A mismatch in the coefficient of thermal expansion is used by the optimal variable-stiffness design. The stiffened areas contract less than the inter-stiffener bay regions. Consequently a stabilizing tensile stress is induced in the prone to buckling bay regions, whereas compressive stresses are distributed to the stiffened areas. Based on the stabilizing thermal stresses and load distribution significant gains in performance are found.