CAD-CAE Integration for Composite Laminate Design Optimization

Abstract

CAD-CAE integration is an important issue for complex structure optimization, which automatically transforms the geometric model from CAD systems to CAE systems and maintains the associations of different types of information after design variables are updated. In composite laminate design optimization (CLDO), the design variables include not only geometric dimensions but also fiber orientation angles and laminate thickness of different plies at individual middle surfaces of a compound shell structure, which makes the information association maintenance more difficult. This paper proposes a CAD-CAE integration scheme for CLDO. In this scheme, an analysis task description for parametric CAD model is created to guide the automatic FEA modeling and analysis process in CAE systems on the basis of parameterindependent identifiers for geometric entities. The permanent naming for geometric entities shared by both CAD and CAE systems is achieved with a marking-point approach and it helps maintaining the association relations between geometric objects and their physical information for different parameters. The proposed approach has been successively applied to create the automatic procedures for static and modal analyses of a complex parameterized shell structure in its CLDO. 