Weight minimization of fiber-reinforced composite materials

Fiber-reinforced composite materials have shown excellent properties and the possibility of outperforming conventional materials, especially in aerospace applications. Among the desired properties of fiber-reinforced composite materials is the possibility of considerably reducing their weight while maintaining the load-carrying capacity. In this study, the stacking sequence of the composite materials was optimized to safely reduce their weights by reducing the laminate thickness under in-plane uniaxial and multi-axial. The optimization algorithm was selected based on its success in finding the global solution optimizing the stacking sequence and ply thickness. The Tsai-Wu failure theory was used to ensure the optimum design found is capable of carrying the design load.