Maximization of Fundamental Frequency of Laminated Composite Cylindrical Shells by Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract

The success in developing modern aerospace systems addresses competitive subjects as optimization, reduced costs, sustainability, environment, weight, and safety. There is an increased demand for lighter materials such as laminated composites. In order to match the demand of aeronautical companies, the shell structures are very important. The dynamic behavior of composite structures is also essential to improve the potential applications of these materials. The knowledge of the dynamic response of the cylindrical shell structures is an important issue in their design, in which the ply thicknesses are often preestablished and the ply orientations are usually restricted to a small set of angles due to manufacturing constraints. Obtaining the best stacking sequence of laminated shell may lead to a problem of combinatorial optimization. As this problem is hard to be solved, several techniques have been developed. Ant colony optimization is a class of heuristic optimization algorithms inspired by the behavior of real ants, related to their ability to find the shortest path between the nest and the food source. Thus, this paper deals with optimal stacking sequence of laminated cylindrical composite shells with the aim of maximizing their fundamental frequency using this approach. The ant colony algorithm was implemented in Matlab platform and was linked to Abaqus academic version to compute the structural response. Cylindrical shells with and without a cutout geometry were studied. Fundamental frequencies were maximized for both cases, and results were presented and discussed.

Maximization of Eigenfrequency Gaps in a Composite Cylindrical Shell Using Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks

“…The optimization procedure described above, with GA as a tool to solve the optimization problem and ANN as a tool that substitutes time-consuming FE calculations, was verified using an example described in [41]. All of the following assumptions (regarding the FE model, material parameters, lamination angles, and so on) are based on this article.…”

“…In order to verify the compatibility of MODEL3 with the FE model used by Koide and Luersen in [41], the fundamental natural frequency was calculated for three different stacking sequences described in [41] and compared with the values in that paper. The results, shown in Table 1, prove that the proposed FE model and the FE model in [41] can be considered compatible. The optimization of the lamination angles in order to obtain the maximum value of the fundamental natural frequency f 1 was performed according to the scheme shown in Figure 2.…”

Mass and buckling criterion optimization of stiffened carbon/epoxy composite cylinder under external hydrostatic pressure

“…The optimization of laminated composite cylindrical shell under different load and pressure has already been highly regarded in literature Haftka and Riche, 1993;Onoda, 1985;Abdi et al, 2012;Koide and Luersen, 2013;Almeida and Awrucha, 2007;Topal, 2011;Raju and Rao, 2015 . In these researches, mass and cost of shell, strength and stiffness, frequency and stability can be function for optimizing.…”

Optimization of Varying Orientation of Continuous Fiber Direction and Its Applications to New Methods of Additive Manufacturing

“…If this requirement is practically unattainable, then the fundamental frequency is required to lie between two excitation frequencies. Koide R & Luersen M [13] proposed the use of an ant colony algorithm to maximize the fundamental frequency of laminated composite cylindrical shells. It Sadr et al [14] presented a new method to optimize constant-stiffness composite plates for maximum fundamental frequency using a combination of Elitist Genetic algorithm and finite strip method.…”

“…This implies that there is an opportunity to optimize the orientation of the fibers to obtain composite structures that outperform unidirectional fiber lay-ups. Studies have shown that in-plane optimal fiber orientation can increase structural stiffness [5][6][7], failure loading [8][9][10] and buckling stress [11][12][13], and improve the fundamental frequency of the laminate [14][15][16][17] over the traditional quasi-isotropic fiber construction without increasing the weight.…”