This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

The current study presents a new approach for optimization of a composite plate subjected to buckling criteria. The proposed approach is coupling a well-known version of Ant Colony Optimization, called Hyper-Cube or HC-ACO, with Ansys Workbench as a Finite Elements Analysis tool for composite plate critical buckling analysis. HC-ACO algorithm demonstrated high performance in solving different combinatorial optimization problems such as the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), scheduling problem and truss structures. The enhanced HC-ACO used here is integrating several daemon actions that improve its local search performance.Furthermore, HC-ACO follows a solution repair strategy to improve solution reliability. Ansys Composite PrePost (ACP) used as FEA tool to determine the critical buckling load factor of the bidirectional loaded composite plate. HC-ACO has been coded using the MATLAB program and integrated to Ansys Workbench using a Python interface that ensures a smooth data switching during the optimization process. Several numerical experiments were conducted to investigate the proposed approach performance. The selected experiments were representing a simply supported composite plate subjected to buckling loads. Different loading conditions have been examined for a different number of plies to include design space size effect on the proposed approach performance. The thickness of each ply was imposed whereas the fiber orientation has the values of 0 °, ±45°, and 90° . The performance measuring criteria consist of different measures such as solution price and reliability. The proposed approach exhibits a significant performance regarding solution cost and quality. Also, the obtained results regarding design space size effect demonstrated a promising performance for more complicated composite structures.