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Zafer Gurdal with Virginia Tech |
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Date: October 16, 2003
Time: 10:00am
Location: NIA, Rm 404
Speaker: Zafer Gurdal with Virginia Tech
Subject: "Tailoring of Advanced Structures and Materials"
Advances in new materials and fabrication technologies are enabling engineers to tailor their designs to meet stringent weight and performance requirements in many aerospace applications. Although tailoring is commonly associated with structural optimization, there are various elements of a successful tailoring implementation that go beyond mathematical optimization. After a brief introduction to tailoring, the presentation will begin with a demonstration of a structural tailoring concept for composite laminates, called variable stiffness concept, which utilizes advanced tow-placement technology to create parts with spatially varying laminate stiffness properties. The example will demonstrate various analysis and fabrication issues that make the design task a computational challenge, and further demonstrate the need for novel design optimization methodology flexible and robust enough to be used for generic design tailoring applications in various multidisciplinary environments. A proposed numerical solution is based on the use of the Cellular Automata (CA) paradigm for simultaneous analysis and design of discrete and continuum structures. The presentation will continue with a brief description of the CA paradigm as an evolutionary design optimization tool and provide an overview of its recent applications to the design of fiber-reinforced composites. In addition to providing a novel software paradigm, the simplicity and inherent massive parallelism of the algorithmic implementations promise substantial computation speed improvements over existing technologies based on hardware/software integration using configurable computing architectures with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Computational implementation with variable precision arithmetic computing, and Multigrid acceleration schemes applied to multidisciplinary problems will be discussed.
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