STOCHASTIC THERMAL BUCKLING ANALYSIS OF VARIABLE ANGLE TOW COMPOSITES

Variable angle tow (VAT) enables tailoring the stiffness distribution across the laminates for improved structural performance by combining the features of advanced automated tape laying and filament winding. However, the performance of VAT composites is affected by the presence of uncertainties in material properties, geometric properties, loads, and boundary conditions that are unwantedly introduced during the manufacturing process. This leads to composite products that may not exactly perform as expected during the operation, which necessitates accounting for the effects of the uncertainties during the design and analysis of VAT composites. Therefore, a sparse polynomial chaos expansion (PCE)-based approach for uncertainty quantification (UQ) and global sensitivity analysis of the thermal buckling response of a variable angle tow (VAT) laminate is presented. Two test cases are considered for thermal buckling analysis of a VAT laminate under material and geometric uncertainties- similar random properties for different plies and different random properties for different plies. Furthermore, the effect of assumption regarding the distribution of random parameters is also studied by considering normal and uniform distribution. The results have been verified with a large number of Monte Carlo Simulations. The results underlined the benefits of using a PCE-based approach for quantifying the effects of uncertainties on the thermal buckling response of VAT laminate and identifying the influential random parameters.