Simultaneous geometrical and material optimal design of hybrid elastomer/composite sandwich plates

The paper presents the complete optimization of a hybrid elastomer/composite sandwich plate structure: design variables consist in the total number of layers of the structure, their respective thicknesses, their fiber orientations, the position(s) of the viscoelastic core(s) and the stacking sentence. The damping of the hybrid structure is calculated by the Method of Strain Energy (MSE). The constrained optimization maximizes the damping loss factor using the linear search algorithm. As an example, the method is applied to a simple structure and the results demonstrate the capabilities of our tool.