THE ANALYSIS OF THIN WALLED COMPOSITE LAMINATED HELICOPTER ROTOR WITH HIERARCHICAL WARPING FUNCTIONS AND FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

In the present paper, a series of hierarchical warping functions is developed to analyze the static and dynamic problems of thin walled composite laminated helicopter rotors composed of several layers with single closed cell. This method is the development and extension of the traditional constrained warping theory of thin walled metallic beams, which had been proved very successful since 1940s. The warping distribution along the perimeter of each layer is expanded into a series of successively corrective warping functions with the traditional warping function caused by free torsion or free beading as the first term, and is assumed to be piecewise linear along the thickness direction of layers. The governing equations are derived based upon the variational principle of minimum potential energy for static analysis and Rayleigh Quotient for free vibration analysis. Then the hierarchical finite element method. is introduced to form a,. numerical algorithm. Both static and natural vibration problems of sample box beams axe analyzed with the present method to show the main mechanical behavior of the thin walled composite laminated helicopter rotor.

Optimal Design for Thin-Walled Box Beam Based on Material Strength Reliability

According to the reliability of material strength,the optimal design for the cross sectional size of thin walled box beam was studied.Firstly the cross sectional size as design random variable was determined,then its stochastic nature was researched,with which the objective function is to seek the maximum reliability of the beam under given constraint conditions.This way is not the same as the conventional optimal design for the minimum weight of the material.With establishing the optimal objective,the reliability of the material under conditions of static and fatigue was considered.The corresponding calculated expressions are given.Normally the cross section sizes are fitted to the normal distribution,for the simplification of the design variable,the variation of the section size is assumed as a dependent variable proportional to the mean of the size.The way is different not only with the conventional optimal design but also with the common reliability design.The maximum reliability of material is obtained,meanwhile the area of the cross section is reduced,i.e.,the weight of the material is decreased.

Layout design of thin-walled structures with lattices and stiffeners using multi-material topology optimization

In this paper,the thin-walled structures with lattices and stiffeners manufactured by additive manufacturing are investigated.A design method based on the multi-material topology optimization is proposed for the simultaneous layout optimization of the lattices and stiffeners in thin-walled structures.First,the representative lattice units of the selected lattices are equivalent to the virtual homogeneous materials whose effective elastic matrixes are achieved by the energy-based homogenization method.Meanwhile,the stiffeners are modelled using the solid material.Subsequently,the multi-material topology optimization formulation is established for both the virtual homogeneous materials and solid material to minimize the structural compliance under mass constraint.Thus,the optimal layout of both the lattices and stiffeners could be simultaneously attained by the optimization procedure.Two applications,the aircraft panel structure and the equipment mounting plate,are dealt with to demonstrate the detailed design procedure and reveal the effect of the proposed method.According to numerical comparisons and experimental results,the thin-walled structures with lattices and stiffeners have significant advantages over the traditional stiffened thin-walled structures and lattice sandwich structures in terms of static,dynamic and anti-instability performance.

EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE FIRST FOLD CREATION IN THIN WALLED COLUMNS

In this paper, a theoretical formula is presented to predict the instantaneous folding force of the first fold creation in square and rectangular columns under axial loading.The rectangular column is a small and single model of honeycombs with square or rectangular cells.Calculations are based on the analysis of the Basic Folding Mechanism （BFM）.For this purpose, sum of the dissipated energy rate under bending around horizontal and inclined hinge lines and the dissipated energy rate under extensional deformations was equal to the work rate of the external force on the structure.The final formula obtained in this research, reasonably predicts the instantaneous folding force of single-cell square and rectangular honeycombs instead of the average value.Finally, according to the calculated theoretical relation, the instantaneous folding force of the first fold creation in a square column was sketched versus folding distance and compared to the experimental results, which showed a good correlation.