Concurrent multi-scale design optimization of fiber-reinforced composite material based on an adaptive normal distribution fiber optimization scheme for minimum structural compliance and additive manufacturing

Abstract

Structural lightweight is a core technical requirement for the structural design of aerospace and new energy power equipment structures. For multi-scale variable stiffness design optimization of discrete fiber-reinforced composite laminates, one of the challenges is how to avoid the explosion of design variable combinations caused by the increase in the number of candidate discrete fiber laying angles. The Normal Distribution Fiber Optimization (NDFO) interpolation scheme has the numerical advantage that the number of design variables does not increase with an increase in the number of candidate discrete fiber laying angles. However, the traditional NDFO interpolation scheme uses uniform penalty parameters across all elements, which means that normalizing the penalty parameters for all the elements ignores the convergence differences of discrete fiber laying angles in different elements within the macro-scale structure topology. This leads to time-consuming and unstable optimization iteration of the macro-scale structural topology and micro-scale discrete fiber laying angle selection. Especially, it easily causes the micro-scale discrete fiber laying angle selection to fall into the local optimum prematurely. Therefore, considering the difficulties and challenges of the traditional NDFO interpolation scheme in the multi-scale variable stiffness design optimization of fiber-reinforced composites. This paper proposes an Adaptive Normal Distribution Fiber Optimization (ANDFO) interpolation scheme, and the feedback mechanism of the convergence rate of the element design variable and the objective function is introduced to achieve the adaptive reduction of the penalty parameters. Based on the proposed ANDFO interpolation scheme, a multi-scale design optimization model of fiber-reinforced composite laminates is established, considering the macro-scale structure topology and micro-scale discrete fiber laying angel selection. The explicit sensitivity of the objective function of minimizing structural compliance to the macro-scale topological design variables and the micro-scale fiber laying angle design variables is derived. Considering the manufacturability of additive manufacturing based on the optimized design results, a multi-scale nonlinear continuous filtering strategy for discrete fiber laying angle is adopted to improve the continuity of the local fiber laying path. Numerical examples systematically present the coupling effects of macro-scale structural topology and micro-scale fiber laying path, multi-scale nonlinear discrete fiber continuous filtering laying path structure, and continuous fiber additive manufacturing multi-scale optimized structure. The proposed ANDFO scheme provides a new theoretical and methodological approach for the lightweight and integrated multi-scale design and manufacturing of fiber-reinforced composite laminates through additive manufacturing technology.