Aeroelastic tailoring of blended composite structures using lamination parameters

The design of composite structures based on fibre angle optimisation rapidly becomes intractable as the number of design variables increases. In order to overcome this issue, lamination parameters (LP) can be used as intermediate design variables to map the non- convex mixed-integers composite optimisation problem onto a convex continuous space. An extra step is then required in order to convert the optimal design expressed in LP into feasible blended stacking sequences (SS). Unfortunately, unpredicted performance disparities between the LP and SS designs are generally observed due to discrepancies between both design spaces. In this paper, the LP blending constraints recently proposed by the authors are applied to the aeroelastic optimisation of the common research wing model in order to decrease these discrepancies and achieve more realistic LP designs. A comparison between the optimised designs achieved with and without the proposed blending constraints is carried out to evaluate our approach. Presented results demonstrate that the application of blending constraints greatly increases the matching quality between LP and SS designs, consequently facilitating the retrieval of equivalent blended stacking sequences.