Abstract
Today fiber reinforced composites such as CFRP (carbon fiber reinforced plastics) have been more and more used for light-weight structural components in various industrial fields such as aerospace. Although there are several sophisticated and practical processing techniques for manufacturing fiber reinforced composite, promise and possibility of additive manufacturing, or 3D printing of those materials like CFRP are indispensable because such newcomers of material and structural processing obviously allow design methodologies widen beyond their conventional design and optimization approaches. Topology optimization designs are very attractive for additive manufacturing product designs. However, this method still seems to be not perfect in case that one tries to apply it to fiber reinforced composite design, in which one should take into consideration of orthotropic and graded material and physical properties. In this preliminary report, the present author tries to raise awareness of this issue and also attempts to formulate an extension or a generalization of the existing density-based topology optimization scheme, that is, SIMP (Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization) method.
