TOPOLOGY DESIGN OF MATERIAL LAYOUT IN STRUCTURED COMPOSITES OF HIGH STIFFNESS AND STRENGTH

General continuous topology design formulations based on families of c lassical Voigt and Reuss mixing assumptions are developed and applied to solve the multiple material layout problem for the design of high s tiffness/high strength composites. In the novel design framework, comp utational homogenization is employed to compute stiffness and strength characteristics of individual composite designs. Alternative design f ormulations for both high stiffness and high strength are investigated along with design sensitivity analysis algorithms. Demonstrative mate rial design problems for boron-epoxy and graphite-epoxy composites are solved with robust sequential quadratic programming (SQP) techniques.