Design Tools for Advanced Tailorable Composites

With the advent of automated tow placement and additive manufacturing, a designer of composite structures must deal with an enormous design space. Fortunately, advances in high-performance computing and software have enabled such design space exploration provided that an appropriate design environment is available.nbsp; M4 Engineering, Inc., in partnership with Virginia Tech (RI) and San Diego State University (subcontractor), will develop such software for design of complex aerospace composite structures with variable fiber tow steer and curvilinear stiffeners.nbsp; Previous research has shown that achieving optimal designs requires optimizing tow steered composite panels together with curvilinear stiffeners, an approach pioneered at Virginia Tech under NASA funding.nbsp; Prior research developments by project team will be leveraged in creating a computationally efficient design optimization methodology.nbsp; Critical to practical success will be the inclusion of realistic manufacturing constraints for achievable fiber tow paths with reasonable manufacturing times.nbsp; Different parameterizations with user-specified flexibility for increasing design degree of freedoms will be implemented for optimizing fiber angles directly in the primary top-level optimization. Constraints on primary fiber path parameters to enforce manufacturability will implemented in the top-level optimization. Computational efficiency will be achieved using efficient reduced order models and convex approximations within the optimization.nbsp; In order to deliver a capability that is primed for widespread utilization, the software tool will be formed as a plug-in to a major commercial software suite.nbsp; Meaningful demonstration problem execution will be used to assess the robustness and efficiency of the approach and to identify future enhancements.nbsp; During Phase I, the essential numerical elements of the software tool will be implemented and a comprehensive plan for GUI integration will be developed.