Identification of elastic properties of composite plate

Abstract

Composite laminates are used extensively in the aerospace industry, especially for the fabrication of high-performance structures. The determination of stiffness parameters for complex materials, such as fibre-reinforced composites, is much more complicated than for isotropic materials. A conventional way is testing the coupon specimens, which are manufactured by technology similar to that used for the real, large structures. When such a method is used, the question arises of whether the material properties obtained from the coupon tests are the same as those in the large structure. Therefore, the determination of actual material properties for composite laminates using non-destructive evaluation techniques has been widely investigated. A number of various non-destructive evaluation techniques have been proposed for determining the material properties of composite laminates. In the present study, attention is focused on the identification of the elastic properties of laminated plate using vibration test data. The problem associated with vibration testing is converting the measured modal frequencies to elastic constants. A standard method for solving this problem is the use of a numerical-experimental model and optimization techniques. The identification functional represents the gap between the numerical model response and the experimental one. This gap should be minimized, taking into account the side constraints on the design variables (elastic constants). The minimization problem is solved by using non-linear mathematical programming techniques and sensitivity analysis. The results obtained were verified by comparing the experimentally measured eigenfrequencies with the numerical ones obtained by FEM at the point of optima © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.