Affordable space exploration beyond the lower Earth orbit will require innovative lightweight structural concepts. Advanced tailorable composites or hybrid material systems can be a means of lightweight exploration vehicles, space habitats, and other space hardware or to enable challenging performance characteristics. However, no commercially available design tools exist to produce advanced highly tailorable designs with optimized load paths or minimized effective coefficient of thermal expansion.
Dr. Liu’s group is working with AnalySwift and Purdue University under a 2022 NASA STTR grant to develop a design tool for tailorable composites and hybrid material systems. The tool will be developed based on the commercial finite element software as “plug-ins”, which provides an integrated computational design framework to enable engineers to leverage the power of commercially available tools for realistic composite structures. Such a tool will reduce the cost of the design optimization associated with tailorable composites and hybrid material systems, accelerating affordable space exploration by NASA and the private sectors.