A simulated annealing method for design of laminates with required stiffness properties

Designing a laminate based on its stiffness properties requires finding the optimum lamination stacking sequence to yield the required stiffness properties. The design variables to be considered are the number of layers and orientation angle of fibers in each layer group, which are treated as discrete-variables. The optimum lamination is then obtained by minimizing a cost function composed of the relative difference between the calculated effective stiffness properties and weight of trial laminate and the desired properties. This error minimization problem was solved using a modified simulated annealing heuristic method. The new simulated annealing implementation comprises a cooling procedure in which the temperature decrease relied adaptively on the objective function evolution. It is shown that the proposed method can give rise to an improvement in convergence speed. To achieve a further improvement in the performance of the method, simulated annealing parallelization implemented using the proposed cooling process. The main features of this algorithm are described and its encouraging results are presented. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.