Abstract
A lamination parameter approach, recently proposed by the authors, is extended in this work to solve a minimum weight design problem for optimizing buckling behavior of laminated composite plates. The present approach basically consists of two parts: the first part is to optimize the lamination parameters by a gradient method, and the second part is to obtain the optimum lay-up (i.e., the fiber orientation angles) by minimizing the errors between the optimum parameters and the parameters for all possible discrete lay-up designs. In the extension of approach, the minimum number of layers with equal thickness is determined so that the plate has higher buckling loads than the specified values. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed approach is quite effective in determining the optimum lay-ups for the minimum weight design.
