EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2009
CAE Technologies for Industry

Multi-objective optimization of thermalelastic properties for multi-phase and multi-layer composites

Xu Yingje - Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an (China)
Bassir David - TUDelft (The Netherlands)
Zhang WeiHong - Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an (China)

Abstract

Multi-phase and multi-layer composite is designable due to the accurate control of the thickness of layers during chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) process. Design optimization of the layers thicknesses to obtain composite with the best possible thermal-elastic properties is significant for the engineering applications. The exact prediction of the effective thermal-elastic properties of multi-phase and multi-layer composite is essential for the design optimization. In this paper, instead of using the homogenization method, a relationship between the strain energy of microstructure and the homogeneous equivalent model is studied for the orthotropic material and a “strain energy based-method” is proposed to predict the effective thermal-elastic properties using the strain energy of microstructure under specific boundary conditions. Compared with the homogenization method, the strain energy-based method demonstrates its simplicity in numerical implementation and its efficiency.
This strategy is coupled to one genetic algorithm for the parameter identification of the thermal-elastic properties. The identification is built as multi-objective optimization problem as we are considering two objectives in our study.