On the stiffness design of thin woven composites

This paper deals with the stiffness design of laminated plates made of woven plies. A specific optimization programme is used to obtain stacking sequences that exhibit required mechanical properties governed by a set of target lamination parameters. The number of plies of the stacking sequences found is much lower than the corresponding solutions found with unidirectional plies. Moreover, most of them are not symmetric even though the corresponding laminated plates are uncoupled and their ply angles are generally not standard.