Stability design of honeycomb sandwich radome with asymmetric shape

The die radome, which is made of honeycomb sandwich structure, should be entirely refitted, for a big electronic observation facility is being fixed at the head section of an aircraft. In this work, the stability design of honeycomb sandwich radome is investigated. Initially, a local buckling failure is observed in the refitted radome during the preliminary calculation. Then design improvements are made to the existing radome, like some L-shaped stiffeners are added on the inner surface of metal faring in order to improve the stability of radome. In this way, the critical buckling load of radome increases more than 10 times. Different layout schemes for the stiffeners are studied during this work, and the best structure layout is obtained by discrete optimization method and also the relationship between stability and bar spacing is examined. Finally, the stability of radome under 45 load cases is calculated to validate the design. The result shows that the optimized design greatly improves the stability of radome. This method can be applied to structure design in preliminary assessment.