Optimisation of CFRP and Aluminium Honeycomb Panels for Spacecraft

Lydia Cabezudo Carrascal, Senior Stress Engineer at Airbus Defence & Space

Spacecraft structures are often constructed of sandwich panels with CFRP skins and aluminium honeycomb core, taking advantage of their low mass, high stiffness and excellent thermal stability. The difficulty of designing structures with these materials resides in the number of design parameters to control as opposed to a monolithic material: number of plies, thickness and orientation of each ply, core density and core thickness. Also, spacecraft structures need to be simultaneously compliant with a wide range of static and dynamic requirements. Traditionally, expertise and engineering judgment are needed in a long trade-off process to achieve a final compliant design, not necessarily fully optimised in weight. By combining free-size and parametric optimisation techniques during the analysis, both structure and material can converge together into a final design that achieves compliance with all requirements while minimizing weight, all in a fraction of the time needed for the traditional approach.