Author(s)

M. Hannachi, H. Naceur, J. L. Batoz & S. Belouettar

Abstract

The present study investigates the formulation and use of solid-shell finite element models which are able to model thin and thick, isotropic and multilayered composite structures using a purely 3D formulation based only on displacement dof. The second part of the paper deals with the optimization of composite structures, using a specific response surface method. This technique has been shown to be more efficient than classical gradient based methods. Several applications combining our solid-shell finite element model and the specific response surface method are shown in order to assess current procedure capabilities. 1 Introduction Solid-shell elements have many advantages compared to the degenerated shell models, because of their kinematic simplicity, their ability in modeling industrial structures generally composed of bulk and thin-walled regions and also special rotations treatment in geometric nonlinear analysis can be avoided. Unfortunately, the formulation of valid solid-shell elements is more complicated than the one used for degenerated shell elements since solid-shell elements are bothered by membrane, shear, trapezoidal and thickness lockings [2, 3]. During last five years, Response Surface Methods (RSM) have gained more and more importance in the optimization of general shell structures [5]. RSM has the advantage of replacing a complex response model by an approximate one based on results calculated at various points in the design space. The optimization is then performed at a lower cost over such response surfaces. Two important issues when applying RSM to a particular problem concern the design of experiments

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