Impact of material and geometrical parameters on the aeroelastic tailoring of uni-directional composite plate-wings

With the growing popularity of composite materials in aeronautics, the study of the influence of their anisotropic properties has been extended from the classical structural problems to the aeroelastic behaviour of aeronautical structures. This type of studies is referred to as aeroelastic tailoring, which implies the optimisation of the composite structure in order to improve its aeroelastic performance. While there has been some work done in this field, the related complex non-linear and non-convex optimisation problems render the investigation of the anisotropic domain quite complicated and costly without predefined simplifications. Such limitations can affect the quality of the optimisation results and overlook some favourable properties. This work focuses on the reformulation of the aeroelastic optimisation problem, in order to achieve a faster convergence with more reliable control over the elastic properties of the final structure. For this purpose a two-level multi-scale optimisation method is carried out. First, a parametric formulation is employed for the optimisation of the aeroelastic behaviour based on the polar formalism for the representation of 2D anisotropic elasticity. Next, a second-level study is considered associated to the retrieval of a stacking sequence with identical properties as the optimal parameters issued from the first-level problem. • Aeroelastic instabilities. • Composite plate-wing. • Polar formalism. • Aeroelastic tailoring. • Two-level optimisation.