Abstract
Variable angle tow (VAT) steered laminate can increase the structural buckling performance of any structure by tailoring the in-plane stress distribution. Consequently, the present study investigates the thermal buckling analysis of a sixteen-layer composite plate containing VAT fibers by the developed finite element (FEM) code. The study found that VAT composite laminate significantly increases the critical buckling temperature compared to conventional quasi-isotropic laminate. Moreover, it is observed that curvilinear VAT laminates are more effective at redistributing in-plane stress from the center toward the support edges of the plate. Unfortunately, these laminates are susceptible to manufacturing defects, which are extremely difficult to detect. Thus, this study explored the effect of manufacturing defects such as gaps and overlaps on structural performance and critical thermal buckling temperature. In the methodology, defects are identified by applying a developed image processing code from the fiber-based prepreg tape image. Despite this, the high-resolution image of the prepreg tape model for the entire laminate results in a very dense mesh, which leads to an expensive structural analysis and requires substantial computational time. Therefore, this study employed the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) based reduced-order modeling algorithm for efficient structural analysis. As a result, the computational time for the static analysis has been significantly reduced.
