A COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION APPROACH TO COMPOSITE-MATERIALS TAILORING

Composite materials offer designers the advantage of tailoring structu res and materials to meet a variety of property and performance requir ements in changing and demanding environments. Hort ever, the wide var iety of material combinations, reinforcement geometries and architectu res to choose from poses a bewildering problem of selection. Thus an a ppropriate, and furthermore optimal, tailoring of composite materials for applications is a challenging design problem and forms the focus o f the article. Specifically, the present work addresses the problem of selecting optimal combinations of matrix and reinforcement materials, and reinforcement morphology, architecture, and volume fraction so as to meet the specified property and performance requirements. The opti mal tailoring problem is solved using the combinatorial optimization t echnique of simulated annealing which works in conjunction with a prop erty model base consisting of analytical relationships between the com posite properties and the microstructure. The matrix materials conside red in the study span the material classes of polymers, metals and cer amics while reinforcement geometries of unidirectional fibers, particu lates and two-dimensional woven fabrics are considered. The overall ap proach and key results of the study are presented and discussed.