Variable stiffness design optimization of fiber-reinforced composite laminates with regular and irregular holes considering fiber continuity for additive manufacturing

Fiber-reinforced composites are an ideal material for the lightweight design of aerospace structures. Especially in recent years, with the rapid development of composite additive manufacturing technology, the design optimization of variable stiffness of fiber-reinforced composite laminates has attracted widespread attention from scholars and industry. In these aerospace composite structures, numerous cutout panels and shells serve as access points for maintaining electrical, fuel,and hydraulic systems. The traditional fiber-reinforced composite laminate subtractive drilling manufacturing inevitably faces the problems of interlayer delamination, fiber fracture, and burr of the laminate. Continuous fiber additive manufacturing technology offers the potential for integrated design optimization and manufacturing with high structural performance. Considering the integration of design and manufacturability in continuous fiber additive manufacturing, the paper proposes linear and nonlinear filtering strategies based on the Normal Distribution Fiber Optimization(NDFO) material interpolation scheme to overcome the challenge of discrete fiber optimization results, which are difficult to apply directly to continuous fiber additive manufacturing. With minimizing structural compliance as the objective function, the proposed approach provides a strategy to achieve continuity of discrete fiber paths in the variable stiffness design optimization of composite laminates with regular and irregular holes. In the variable stiffness design optimization model, the number of candidate fiber laying angles in the NDFO material interpolation scheme is considered as design variable. The sensitivity information of structural compliance with respect to the number of candidate fiber laying angles is obtained using the analytical sensitivity analysis method. Based on the proposed variable stiffness design optimization method for complex perforated composite laminates, the numerical examples consider the variable stiffness design optimization of typical non-perforated and perforated composite laminates with circular, square,and irregular holes, and systematically discuss the number of candidate discrete fiber laying angles,discrete fiber continuous filtering strategies, and filter radius on structural compliance, continuity,and manufacturability. The optimized discrete fiber angles of variable stiffness laminates are converted into continuous fiber laying paths using a streamlined process for continuous fiber additive manufacturing. Meanwhile, the optimized non-perforated and perforated MBB beams after discrete fiber continuous treatment, are manufactured using continuous fiber co-extrusion additive manufacturing technology to verify the effectiveness of the variable stiffness fiber optimization framework proposed in this paper.