The thermal-mechanical buckling and postbuckling design of composite laminated plate using a ROM-driven optimization method

Abstract

The high temperature environment makes the buckling of composite laminated plate happen earlier. Further weight savings can be achieved once the plate has a favorable postbuckling stiffness. This study aims to address this issue by developing a ROM-driven lamination optimization to maximize the buckling and postbuckling performance of compressed plates under initial temperature field. The reduced-order model(ROM) constructed using the improved Koiter theory is reformulated to be suitable for thermal-mechanical buckling problems. A linear subspace of the force space is represented to be the span of the mechanical load, the thermal load and a set of predefined perturbation loads. The thermal load related to the initial temperature field is constant during the increase of in-plane compressive load. An independently additional degree of freedom corresponding to the thermal load is implemented into the construction of the reduced-order model. The buckling and postbuckling performance can be extracted from the solution of reduced-order model, and then subsequently selected as inputs to achieve the optimal laminate. The main novelty of this work is to achieve the thermal-mechanical buckling and postbuckling optimization, benefitting from the highly efficient single run of thermoelastic geometrically nonlinear analysis. Various numerical examples have been selected to validate the performance of the proposed method, considering the influences of length-to-width ratio, α₁/α₂, ply number and nonuniform temperature field.

Keywords:

• Lamination optimization
• initial temperature field
• postbuckling
• reduced-order model
• thermal load

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability

The raw/processed data required to reproduce these findings cannot be shared at this time as the data also forms part of an ongoing study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11972300 and 11602286), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No. D5000220177).