Frequency optimization of laminated composite plates

Laminated fibrous composite plates are finding a wide range of applications in structural design, especially for their light weight and high stiffness and strength. In this article, a genetic algorithm based optimum design method is presented to maximize fundamental frequency of laminated composite plates under any combination of the three classical edge conditions. The first natural frequencies of laminated composite plates were obtained from modal analysis of plates using the finite element method. Furthermore, first natural frequencies of the plate were defined as fitness function in Genetic Algorithm. Genetic Algorithm, which is one of the methods inspire from nature, can successfully optimize problems with discrete variables. The results from the proposed method show that the Genetic Algorithm predicted successfully the optimal layer sequences without yielding a local optimum.

Keywords:

Modal analysis , Laminated plate , Genetic Algorithm , Optimization