Aeroelastic Design of Blended Composite Structures Using Lamination Parameters

Abstract

The design of composite structures based on _bre angle optimisation rapidly becomes intractable as the number of design variables increases. Lamination parameters can be used instead as intermediate design variables in order to overcome this issue. An extra step is then required in order to convert the optimal design expressed in lamination param- eter into feasible blended stacking sequences. However, disparities between the lamination parameter and stacking sequence designs performance are generally observed due to dis- crepancies between both design spaces. In this paper, the lamination parameter blending constraints recently proposed by the authors are applied to the aeroelastic optimisation of the common research wing model in order to diminish these discrepancies and achieve more realistic lamination parameter designs. A comparison between the optimised designs achieved with and without the proposed blending constraints is carried out to evaluate our approach. Results demonstrate that the application of blending constraints greatly in- creases the matching quality between lamination parameter and stacking sequence designs, consequently facilitating the retrieval of equivalent blended stacking sequences.