Development of vibration performances of hybrid laminated composite materials by using stochastic methods

In recent years, laminated composites are fairly utilized in marine, automotive, aerospace, military and other engineering applications because of their high specific modulus (ratio between the young modulus and the density) and high specific strength (ratio between strength and density). In addition to these features, fiber reinforced composites have inherent tailorability such as fiber orientation and stacking sequence and provide great possibilities to designers against isotropic materials. Determination of the fundamental frequency performance of laminated composite plate is crucial for the design of the composite structures. Especially, in dynamical engineering systems, fundamental frequency have to be taken into account in order to prevent resonance arising from external excitations. Laminated composite materials can fulfill this requirement with an appropriate stacking sequence by using optimization methods.
In this thesis, the optimum designs of non-hybrid and hybrid laminated composite plates have been investigated. The considered laminated plate is simply supported on four sides. In non-hybrid cases, fundamental frequency is taken as objective function and fiber orientation angles of the laminated composites are taken as discrete and continuous design variables. The optimization has been conducted using graphite/epoxy, glass/epoxy and flax/epoxy materials for various aspect ratios (0.2-2). Single objective optimization formulation have been used for mathematical verification of model problems. In hybrid cases, multi objective approach is considered to maximize the fundamental frequency and minimize the cost simultaneously. The design variables of the multi objective optimization problems are selected as fiber orientation angles, the number of outer layers (No) having high-stiffness and more expensive and the number of inner layers (Ni ) having low-stiffness and inexpensive. Multi objective optimization has been carried out using hybrid graphite-glass/epoxy and graphite-flax/epoxy materials for various aspect ratios (0.2-2).
Ecological approach in automotive, aerospace and marine industries have stated that natural fibers (especially flax) are of great importance for their use as alternative reinforcing materials to glass fibers because of their inherent good vibration and cost
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performances. In this regard, the present study is an attempt to show the usage of flax fiber as an alternative to E-glass in interply hybrid composite structures in terms of fundamental frequency and cost. Stacking sequences design and optimization of laminated composites based on Differential Evolution (DE), Nelder Mead (NM), Random Search (RS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms are considered. The results show that the proposed optimum graphite-flax/epoxy interply composite structure give better than the result of graphite-glass/epoxy in terms of maximum fundamental frequency and minimum cost. It is also found that DE, NM and SA algorithms show superior or at least comparable performance versus Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in the literature for the same laminated structure design problems.