Date of Award

12-2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics

Department

Aeronautics and Astronautics

First Advisor

Wenbin Yu

Committee Chair

Wenbin Yu

Committee Member 1

Tyler N. Tallman

Committee Member 2

Vikas Tomar

Abstract

Motivated by a recently discovered concept, Structure Genome (SG) which is defined as the smallest mathematical building block of a structure, a new approach named Mechanics of Structure Genome (MSG) to model and analyze composite plates is introduced. MSG is implemented in a general-purpose code named SwiftComp™, which provides the constitutive models needed in structural analysis by homogenization and pointwise local fields by dehomogenization. To improve the user friendliness of SwiftComp™, a simple graphic user interface (GUI) based on ANSYS Mechanical APDL platform, called ANSYS-SwiftComp GUI is developed, which provides a convenient way to create some common SG models or arbitrary customized SG models in ANSYS and invoke SwiftComp™ to perform homogenization and dehomogenization. The global structural analysis can also be handled in ANSYS after homogenization, which could predict the global behavior and provide needed inputs for dehomogenization.

To demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the MSG approach, several numerical cases are studied and compared using both MSG and ANSYS. In the ANSYS approach, 3D solid element models (ANSYS 3D approach) are used as reference models and the 2D shell element models created by ANSYS Composite PrepPost (ACP approach) are compared with the MSG approach. The results of the MSG approach agree well with the ANSYS 3D approach while being as efficient as the ACP approach. Therefore, the MSG approach provides an efficient and accurate new way to model composite plates.

Share

COinS