Optimal laminations of thin underwater composite cylindrical vessels

Abstract

This paper deals with the optimal design of deep submarine exploration housings and autonomous underwater vehicles. The structures under investigation are thin-walled laminated composite unstiffened vessels. Structural buckling failure due to the high external hydrostatic pressure is the dominant risk factor at exploitation conditions. The search of fiber orientations of the composite cylinders that maximize the stability limits is investigated. A genetic algorithm procedure coupled with an analytical model of shell buckling has been developed to determine numerically optimized stacking sequences. Characteristic lamination patterns have been obtained. FEM analyses have confirmed the corresponding significant increases of buckling pressures with respect to initial design solutions. Experiments on thin glass/epoxy and carbon/epoxy cylinders have been performed. The measured buckling pressures appear to be in good agreement with numerical results and demonstrate the gains due to the optimized laminations

Numerical and Experimental Investigation of the Hydrostatic Performance of Fibre Reinforced Tubes

“…The benefits of the extra reinforcement of the hoop direction were highlighted first by Mistry [31] and later by Messeger et al [32] who proved composite wound tubes consisting of high angle (80 • and 90 • ) layers provided higher resistance to buckling under external pressure than α=55 • . Several researchers have explored fracture phenomena, design parameters and failure modes of composite tubes under external loading or biaxial loading [33][34][35].…”

Memetic Computing Applied to the Design of Composite Materials and Structures

“…Callahan and Weeks [24], Nagendra et al [25], Le Riche and Haftka [26], and Ball et al [27] have been the first to adopt and use GA for the design of piling sequences of composite laminated materials. GA has also been used in problems with different objective functions, such as strength [28,29], buckling loads [9,28,[30][31][32][33][34], dimensional stability [35], strain energy absorption [36], weight (either as a restriction or as an objective to minimize) [37,38], bending/torsion connection, stiffness [36,39], basic frequencies [34,[40][41][42], distortion [43], or finding laminate reference parameters [44]. GA have also been applied in the design of a variety of composite structures ranging from simple rectangular plates to complex geometrical sheets, such as sandwich panels [45], rigid sheets [46], bolt joints [47], and laminated cylindrical panels [34].…”

Design Optimization of Composite Laminated Tube Based on Improved Niching Evolutionary Algorithm

“…Most applications do not consider the number of plies as a design variable [14][15][16][17][18]. Azarafza et al [18] set the fiber volume ratio, ply orientations, and ply thickness as design variables and performed a multiobjective optimization of the weight and transient dynamic response of a composite laminated tube using a basic genetic algorithm (GA).…”