OPTIMAL DESIGN OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE STRUCTURES VIA HYBRID CHARGED SYSTEM SEARCH AND PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

摘要

Composite laminates have many applications as advanced engineering materials, primarily as components in civil engineering structures, aircrafts, power plants, ships, cars, rail vehicles, robots, sports equipment, etc. Due to widespread use of these materials in various fields in this paper the minimum thickness design of laminated composite plates under inplain loading is explored using a hybrid charged system search algorithm (CSS) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) where ply numbers and fiber orientations are considered as design variables. This optimization method is obtained by adding searching abilities of the PSO algorithm to those of the CSS approach. Static failure criteria are utilized to determine whether the load bearing capacity is exceeded for a configuration generated during the optimization process. In order to check the feasibility of solutions during an optimization procedure, both the Tsai–Wu and the maximum stress safety factors are employed. Numerical results are obtained and presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm for different loading cases. Compared to other approaches, the algorithm has proven to be quite reliable in performing these designs.