Multi-objective evolutionary optimization design of composite structure embedded with cocured viscoelastic layers

It's difficult for traditional design methods to achieve the optimization design of composite structures embedded with cocured viscoelastic layers, because their strength, stiffness, mass and damping characteristic must be taken into account simultaneously and there are too many design variables. Taking structure mass and modal damping factor as two optimized objectives, a multi-objective optimization model is developed. Design variables include ply thickness, ply orientation angle and viscoelastic layer thickness. Constraints are imposed on modal frequencies. A finite element method-based modal strain energy method is selected to calculate the modal damping factor. An improved nondominated sorting genetic algorithm(NSGA-II) is selected as the multi-objective optimization algorithm. Finally, two test cases are optimized. The results show that the multi-objective evolutionary optimization can be used as effective design method for the composite structure embedded with cocured viscoelastic layers.