Aeroelastic tailoring of composite sandwich panel with lamination parameters

For sandwich panel with a thick core, stiffness matrix of composite sandwich panel can be formulated as function of membrane lamination parameters of the composite facesheet. In this paper, the flutter speed of a cantilevered sandwich panel is studied using lamination parameters of composite facesheet, with influence of transverse shear on sandwich panel considered. The results show that the flutter mode switch is not only related to the bending stiffness change, and also the transverse shear effect can result in switch of flutter mode. A minimum weight design of composite sandwich panel is conducted by using master-slave parallel real-coded genetic algorithm, with lamination parameters of facesheet and transverse shear modulus of foam core as design variables. The constraints considered include the flutter and divergence velocity constraints, the bound constraints of thicknesses of the facesheet and foam core. The feasible region constraints of membrane lamination parameters are also considered.