Search

The use of composite materials has grown considerably during recent years, most prominently in the aerospace and automobile industries, as well as in the civil and naval industries. Composite materials display outstanding specific strength and stiffness properties, and a broad capacity for customization. Both qualities have contributed to their application in industries sensitive to the weight of materials such as steel or other alloys. However, composites’ behavior is more difficult to predict due to multiple failure modes. Therefore, complex models and powerful software are normally required to design components made of composite materials, both during the creation of the model and in the results post-processing, adding time to the design process. It would be helpful to automate part of this process in order to speed up the pre-design step. The aim of this project is the development of a tool that will ease the design of composite stiffened panels, reducing the time required to create the model while also allowing fast modifications of a given design in order to maximize the design efficiency. The tool will be able to generate the mesh and geometry from a set of predefined parameters that defines a given panel, and it will compute the critical buckling load of the first five modes, along with the visualization of the deformed panel to ensure quick post-processing. In order to render this tool accessible, it will be implemented in a web environment (CADEC) using advanced features such as object-oriented programming, user authentication and databases. After implementing such a tool in CADEC, it was used to predict the buckling load of several real cases of stiffened panels. Since the results obtained with CADEC generally coincided with the experimental results analyzed, the tool and its results can be safely validated. Ingeniería Industrial