A general strategy for the optimal design of composite laminates by the polar-genetic method

The object of the present work is the development and application of a totally general approach to optimal design of composite laminates where all the required properties for the laminate are explicitly expressed as criteria of the optimisation process. Our formulation is in the form of a highly non-linear and non-convex single- or multi-objective optimisation problem subject to equality and inequality constraints. We show here applications to the design of maximum stiffness, maximum buckling load, maximum eigenfrequencies, maximum strength as well as combinations of the afore mentioned criteria; all types of elastic symmetries can also be taken into account. In order to keep the same greatest generality in solving our optimisation problem, we developed an evolved version of the genetic algorithm BIANCA for the design of composite laminates. We show here a number of numerical solutions found using BIANCA.