MINIMUM WEIGHT DESIGN OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE PANELS UNDER STRENGTH AND DISPLACEMENT CONSTRAINTS

The present paper treats a minimum weight design of laminated composite panels under in-plane loading. Constraints consist of strength and displacement conditions. Layer orientation angles as well as layer thicknesses are used as design variables. An approximation method is applied to generate a high-quality approximate optimization problem. Stress components are evaluated using a linear approximation of stress resultants while displacements are approximated in a linear form. Transformed design variables with respect to the layer angles are also introduced to reduce the nonlinearity between the strength constraints and the layer angles. It is shown that optimal laminate configurations can be obtained with fewer than ten iterations.