Effect of thickness variation on the aeroelastic performance of continuous tow sheared structures

Abstract

Continuous tow shearing is a promising manufacturing technique which can produce highly tailored steered carbon fibre laminates. This has been shown to improve the buckling resistance and aeroelastic performance of composite structures. One of the differences in the modelling in comparison to conventional laminates is that the thickness depends on how much the fibres are steered. Many optimisation studies use Tsai lamination parameters which cannot these thickness changes in the modelling. This work aims to highlight the importance of including the effect of thickness coupling when modelling the aeroelastic behaviour of continuous tow-sheared composites. A semi-analytical plate model was used in this work which has been validated against a finite element model. The effect of thickness variation can be significant but is not uniform therefore neglecting this effect could impact the design optimisation process. The impact on the uncertainty distribution is less significant so the lamination parameter could still be used to assess the reliability of layups if corrected using a model which includes thickness
coupling.

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ORCID for Jie Yuan: orcid.org/0000-0002-2411-8789

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