Optimum Design of Laminated Composites for Minimum Thickness by a Variant of Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

In the present study, a method of optimizing the design of laminated composite with new genetic algorithm techniques, selection strategy and mutation operator, is proposed. Experiments are designed to minimize thickness (or weight) of midplane-symmetric composite laminate subject to in-plane loading, with fiber orientation and ply thickness chosen as design variables. To avoid spurious laminate designs, both the Tsai-Wu and the maximum stress criteria are taken to determine whether load-bearing capacity is exceeded or not. The state-of-art experiment results are obtained for some loading cases, related numerical results are presented under different cases. The simulation results clearly show that the proposed algorithm provide better or equivalent solutions for the design of laminated composites than work in related literature.