Laminate design of composite plate wings for aeroelastic characteristics using real-coded distributed genetic algorithms

The present paper treats the flutter and divergence characteristics of composite plate wings with various sweep angles. First, the effect of laminate configurations on the flutter and divergence characteristics is investigated for composite plate wings. To examine the effect of laminate configurations, the flutter and divergence characteristics are represented on the lamination parameter plane. The representation gives a comprehensive explanation of the effects of principal-axis stiffness and bending-torsional coupling on the flutter and divergence characteristics. Next, we obtain the laminate configurations and the thickness distributions expressed by the second order polynomial to minimize the weight of plate wing under the flutter and divergence velocity constraints. A minimum weight design is conducted by using real-coded distributed genetic algorithms in which lamination parameters are used as design variables. The effectiveness of aeroelastic tailoring can be demonstrated through the optimization results.