Blending design of composite laminated structure with panel permutation sequence

Previously, the concept of Ply Drop Sequence (PDS) is introduced by the authors for the designing of composite laminated structures with multiple regions. Compared to deleting a contiguous innermost/outermost plies in the classical guide-based blending, using PDS is more flexible than dropping plies between adjacent regions. In this article, a new blending model called the Permutation for Panel Sequence (PPS) blending model is proposed to correct the problem of repeated searching of discrete points in the design space for the previous PDS blending model. The proposed method is also applied to an 18-panel horseshoe benchmark problem. The results demonstrate that the useful searching points in the PPS method are less than those in the PDS method when the number of the panels is less than the number of plies in the guide laminate, and the PPS method obtains a faster convergence speed compared with the PDS method.