Interfacial shear stress optimization in sandwich beams with polymeric core using non-uniform distribution of reinforcing ingredients

in Composite Structures (2015)

Core shearing and core/face debonding are two common failure states of sandwich beams which are mainly the result of excessive shear stresses in the core. Generally, the core made of homogeneous Fiber ... [more ▼]

Core shearing and core/face debonding are two common failure states of sandwich beams which are mainly the result of excessive shear stresses in the core. Generally, the core made of homogeneous Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) shows better shear resistance in comparison with that made of pure polymer. Usually, this enhancement is however somewhat limited. This paper proposes a methodology to decrease interfacial stresses by presenting the optimal distribution of reinforcing ingredients in the polymeric matrix. For this purpose, a Non-Uniform Rational Bspline (NURBS) based reinforcement distribution optimizer is developed. This technique aims at the local stress minimization within any arbitrary zone of the design domain. In our methodology, optimization and model analysis (calculation of the objective function and the design constraints) have common data sets. The quadratic NURBS basis functions smoothly define the reinforcement distribution function as a NURBS surface. The core and face sheets are modeled as multi-patches and compatibility in the displacement field is enforced by the penalty method. An adjoint sensitivity method is devised to minimize the objective function within areas of interest defined over arbitrary regions in the design domain. It is also used for efficient updating of design variables through optimization iterations. The method is verified by several examples. [less ▲]

Advances in Applied Mechanics

Book published by Elsevier (2014)

Advances in Applied Mechanics draws together recent significant advances in various topics in applied mechanics. Published since 1948, Advances in Applied Mechanics aims to provide authoritative review ... [more ▼]

Advances in Applied Mechanics draws together recent significant advances in various topics in applied mechanics. Published since 1948, Advances in Applied Mechanics aims to provide authoritative review articles on topics in the mechanical sciences, primarily of interest to scientists and engineers working in the various branches of mechanics, but also of interest to the many who use the results of investigations in mechanics in various application areas, such as aerospace, chemical, civil, environmental, mechanical and nuclear engineering. [less ▲]

Shape optimisation with isogeometric boundary element methods

Presentation (2014, December)

Multiscale fracture across scales and time

Scientific Conference (2014, November 11)

Multi-scale Computational Mechanics in Aerospace Engineering Flying is today one of the safest ways to spend our time. In the United Kingdom, for example, it is 33,000 times more likely to die from a ... [more ▼]

Multi-scale Computational Mechanics in Aerospace Engineering Flying is today one of the safest ways to spend our time. In the United Kingdom, for example, it is 33,000 times more likely to die from a clinical error than from an air crash. This is probably the consequence of over a century of experience building, starting with the Wright brothers at the beginning of the 20th century to the most recent aerospace developments culminating in technological giants such as the Airbus A380 and the Boeing Dreamliner, through the enlightening catastrophic events of the "Comet Aircraft”, ``Liberty Ships'' and many others. Yet, with the increasing urge to increase flight efficiency, decrease costs and Carbon emissions, airlines have been pushed to drive down the weight of aircraft, whilst guaranteeing their safety. This push for lighter aircraft has progressively seen a reduction in the use of metallic components which have been slowly replaced by composite materials. Such composite materials are made up of two or more phases of which they exploit the mechanical complementarity. For some applications, such as thermal barrier coatings, thermal complementarity is also leveraged. Yet, these novel materials, and especially their failure mechanisms and durability have proven difficult to understand, both through physical and virtual, in silico, experiments. One of the reasons for this is the large ratio between the size of the smallest constituent relevant in the description of failure mechanisms (e.g. 5-10 micron diameter carbon fibres) and the size of the structure (79m wingspan A380). In this presentation, we will briefly review advances in modeling and simulation of failure across the scales. We will discuss non exhaustively some of the recent advances in this field, ranging from adaptive atomistic modeling of fracture to algebraic model reduction methods for severely non-linear problems, including homogenization. We will also discuss the relevance of such simulations in daily engineering practice and claim that devising interactive simula- tors able to let engineers interact with the composite structure of interest and thus develop intuition about these advanced and complex materials. We will conclude by making a parallel between the difficulties encountered in modeling complex aerospace components and those met in personalized medicine, by discussing briefly the concept of Digital Twin. [less ▲]

Cardiff/Luxembourg Computational Mechanics Research Group

Poster (2014, November)

Discrete Multiscale Modelling and Future Research Plans concerning Metals (presentation)

Presentation (2014, October 14)

Uncertainty quantification of dry woven fabrics: A sensitivity analysis on material properties

in Composite Structures (2014), 116

Based on sensitivity analysis, we determine the key meso-scale uncertain input variables that influence the macro-scale mechanical response of a dry textile subjected to uni-axial and biaxial deformation ... [more ▼]

Based on sensitivity analysis, we determine the key meso-scale uncertain input variables that influence the macro-scale mechanical response of a dry textile subjected to uni-axial and biaxial deformation. We assume a transversely isotropic fashion at the macro-scale of dry woven fabric. This paper focuses on global sensitivity analysis; i.e. regression- and variance-based methods. The sensitivity of four meso-scale uncertain input parameters on the macro-scale response are investigated; i.e. the yarn height, the yarn spacing, the yarn width and the friction coefficient. The Pearson coefficients are adopted to measure the effect of each uncertain input variable on the structural response. Due to computational effectiveness, the sensitivity analysis is based on response surface models. The Sobol’s variance-based method which consists of first-order and total-effect sensitivity indices are presented. The sensitivity analysis utilizes linear and quadratic correlation matrices, its corresponding correlation coefficients and the coefficients of determination of the response uncertainty criteria. The correlation analysis, the response surface model and Sobol’s indices are presented and compared by means of uncertainty criteria influences on MataBerkait-dry woven fabric material properties. To anticipate, it is observed that the friction coefficient and yarn height are the most influential factors with respect to the specified macro-scale mechanical responses. [less ▲]

Shape optimisation directly from CAD: an isogeometric boundary element approach

Report (2014)

Global Energy Minimization for Multi-crack Growth in Linear Elastic Fracture using the Extended Finite Element Method

Presentation (2014, July 24)

Parallel simulations of soft-tissue using an adaptive quadtree/octree implicit boundary finite element method

in 11th. World Congress on Computational Mechanics (2014, July 23)

Octree (3D) and quadtree (2D) representations of computational geometry are particularly well suited to modelling domains that are defined implicitly, such as those generated by image segmentation ... [more ▼]

Octree (3D) and quadtree (2D) representations of computational geometry are particularly well suited to modelling domains that are defined implicitly, such as those generated by image segmentation algorithms applied to medical scans [5]. In this work we consider the simulation of soft-tissue which can be modelled with a incompressible hyperelastic constitutive law. We include the effects of both non-linear geometry and material properties in our model. Similarly to Moumnassi et al. [2] we use the implicitly defined level set functions as the basis for a partition of unity enrichment to more accurately represent the domain boundary on the cartesian quadtree/octree mesh. In addition we introduce arbitrary cuts and discontinuities in the domain using ideas from the classical extended finite element method [3]. Because of its hydrated nature soft-tissue is nearly incompressible [1]. We explore the use of a classical two-field displacement-pressure (u-p) mixed approach to deal with the problem of volumetric-locking in the incompressible limit [4]. We exploit the existing parallel capabilities available in the open-souce finite element toolkit deal.ii [6], including the advanced mesh partitioning and balancing recently introduced in the p4est library [7]. The resulting method scales to run over hundreds of cores on the University of Luxembourg HPC platform. [less ▲]