Weight and mechanical performance optimization of blended composite wing panels using lamination parameters

In this paper, a lamination parameter-based approach to weight optimization of composite aircraft wing structures is addressed. It is a bi-level procedure where at the top level lamination parameters and numbers of plies of the pre-defined angles (0, 90, 45 and −45°) are used as design variables, the material volume is treated as an objective function to be minimized subject to the buckling, strength and ply percentage constraints. At the bottom level the optimum stacking sequence is obtained subject to the requirements on blending and preservation of mechanical properties. To ensure composite blending, a multi-stage optimization is performed by a permutation genetic algorithm aiming at matching the lamination parameters passed from the top level optimization as well as satisfying the layup rules. Two new additional criteria, the 90° ply angle jump index and the stack homogeneity index, are introduced to control the uniformity of the three ply angles (0, 90, 45 and −45) spread throughout the stack as well as improve the stack quality and mechanical performance by encouraging 45° angle change between neighbouring groups of plies. The results of the application of this approach are compared to published results to demonstrate the potential of the developed technique