Multi-component topology and material orientation design of composite structures (MTO-C)

This paper presents a topology optimization method for structures made of multiple composite components (substructures) with tailored material orientations. It is capable of simultaneously optimizing the overall topology, component partitioning, and material orientation for each component, via a vector field variable that specifies fractional membership to each component, together with the conventional density and orientation variables. The convergence towards the non-fractional, zero/one membership during optimization is achieved by a hypercube-to-simplex projection of the membership variables with a penalization scheme. Through the integration with a continuous material orientation design method, the proposed method is capable of generating multi-component composite structures with tailored material orientations for each component, without a prescribed set of alternative discrete angles. The new method extends the existing continuous material orientation design methods by introducing the concept of components (substructures) with the component-level orientation control, which is suitable for economical production with the conventional high-volume composite manufacturing processes.