Thermally driven morphing with hybrid laminates and metal matrix composites

Analytical and experimental results are presented regarding thermally-driven morphing laminated shells. Owing to exploitation of the geometric nonlinearity of thin shells, they can demonstrate highly nonlinear displacement response to thermal loading, including multistability and snap-through behavior. In order to predict this behavior, an energy-based multi- stability model is proposed which utilizes experimentally-measured 1D thermally-induced curvatures as input parameters to determine the shell's 2D flexural behavior. Experiments are conducted to measure the 1D curvatures in both hybrid CFRP-metal laminates, as well as high-temperature capable SiC/Ti metal matrix composites. Data from these experiments is used to predict the geometrically nonlinear response of thermally loaded shells, and results are compared with experiment using 3D digital image correlation. The potential impact of this research is the realization of thermal and uid control devices capable of operating autonomously in extreme environments such as gas turbine engine cores..