Affordable space exploration beyond the lower Earth orbit will require innovative lightweight structural concepts. Lightweighting potential stemming from the application of composite materials oftentimes fails to fully exploit the potential for reducing mass due to the lack of design tools tailored to yield designs with optimal load paths. Consequently, highly tailorable material systems are commonly used to produce quasi-isotropic or otherwise off-optimal designs. This project seeks to advance the design capabilities for tow-steered composite laminates.
Dr. Liu’s team is working on developing a design tool based on the commercial finite element software as the “plug-ins”, which provides an integrated computational design framework to enable engineers to leverage the power of commercially available tools for real structures made of tailorable composites. This research will benefit NASA by exploiting the potential of tailorable composites for designing better space structures. Such a tool will reduce the cost associated with tailorable composites and accelerate affordable space exploration by NASA and the private sectors.
“Advanced composite materials like tow-steered composite laminates are highly customizable, and therefore have a great potential to reduce the mass and energy consumption for lightweight structures. Collaborating with AnalySwift and Purdue, we are implementing advanced multiscale plate theory into the graphical user interfaces in Abaqus and MSC.Patran/Nastran. The software packages to be developed will offer a user-friendly, high-fidelity design framework for tow-steered composite laminates, which can be applied to many space structures such as satellite buses, landers, rovers, and other exploration vehicles, solar arrays, and antennas.”