Optimum Design for the Bottom Panel of a Heavy-Duty Truck by Using a Composite Sandwich Structure

Improving the fuel efficiency of heavy-duty trucks is essential for sustainable energy supply and future economic development. Consequently, new technologies are needed to enhance energy security in the transportation sector. In this context, this study investigates the optimal design of a composite sandwich panel as a lightweight structure to replace the conventional materials in the bottom panel of a heavy truck. The composite sandwich structure generally consists of an aluminium honeycomb core with two Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) composite face sheets. The goal of this study is to call for new optimum design strategies of the composite sandwich structures to reduce heavy trucks' body mass. In this work, the orientation of the composite layers and the core thickness were set as design variables for the optimisation problem. At the same time, the total weight of the structure is considered as the optimisation objective. Moreover, the constraints of the optimisation problem are set to be related to the strength limits of the face sheets and the core. The Classical Lamination Theory and the failure equations of composite plates are formulated using Excel software. To solve the optimisation problem, a Multi-Island Genetic Algorithm is applied under the I-sight software environment interacting with Excel. The numerical model is built using Abaqus Cae software. A good agreement was found between the numerical and optimisation results in terms of the overall deformation of the sandwich for this study. It is worth mentioning that the weight of the bottom plate of a heavy truck can be significantly reduced if the proper sandwich face sheets layup and core thickness are determined. The main added value of the research is the elaboration of the optimisation method for the bottom panel of heavy-duty trucks in order to define the optimal combination of honeycomb core and composite face sheets.