Authors: Drougkas Dimitrios, Korbetis George | BETA CAE Systems S.A.
Composite materials’ role is rapidly expanding in many industries, such as the automotive, aerospace, and maritime, resulting in an increased demand for Computer Aided engineering (CAE) software that can provide fast and detailed models. Due to their nature, the design and optimization of fiber reinforced laminated composite material models can be a time consuming task. BETA CAE Systems S.A., through its ANSA / μETA pre- and post- processing suite, offers advanced capabilities in handling composite materials and setting up optimization tasks that greatly facilitate analyses involving optimization studies for composite materials.
In this paper, the optimum weight and the angle of attack of a Formula 1 front wing has been determined through a two-step optimization approach. In the first step, using ANSA interface and NASTRAN’s SOL 200 Topometry Optimization, the areas requiring reinforcement by increasing their thickness, were identified. Continuing, using the results from the thickness distribution, the model was partitioned to areas according to thickness and composite material layers (plies) were distributed to these areas. An optimization problem was set up in ANSA, by automatically creating two design variables for each layer, one for ply orientation and one for thickness.
The second step was the setup of modeFRONTIER using ANSA and μETA nodes to facilitate the interaction between the software. For this optimization process a multi-objective genetic algorithm has been used.
