Abstract
A new design method of functional fiber reinforced plastics (FRP) materials which imitates the micro structure of bone or shell in the natural world is proposed in this work. The material has local anisotropy induced by optimally distributed short fibers. The present design method combines a genetic algorithm method (GA) with layerwise optimization concept. The first frequency of thin plates is chosen as an objective function to be maximized in the optimization and it is turned out that the present plates always give higher natural frequencies compared to conventional plates which are reinforced by parallel fibers. Moreover, it is also revealed that optimally distributed short fibers tend to be allocated with certain tendency.
