Aeroelastic tailoring of composite rudder skin considering variable angle tow laminates by a hybrid backtracking search-JAYA-Sine Cosine Algorithm

Abstract

Flutter is a typical dynamic instability phenomenon of the wing or rudder structure. Besides, the phenomenon of aerodynamic heating will be quite significant and temperature can rise rapidly with the increase of the flight speed, thermal flutter characteristics should be taken into consideration for the rudder structure of supersonic vehicle. To improve the thermal flutter characteristics of the rudder structure and meet the design requirements of a lightweight structure, this article optimizes the variable stiffness laminates of the skin on the premise of keeping the thickness of the skin unchanged, so as to improve the critical flutter speed of the rudder. A novel intelligent optimization algorithm named BJASCA, which is a hybrid algorithm coupling of Backtracking Search Algorithm, Sine Cosine Algorithm, and JAYA Algorithms is proposed in this article to improve the efficiency of structural optimization and this algorithm shows obvious advantages in searching global optima compared with several other algorithms. The finite element model and aerodynamic model of the rudder are established to calculate the critical flutter speed. The results represent that the rudder structure optimized by the BJASCA algorithm shows better flutter characteristics and the critical flutter speed can be increased by 76.4% compared with the un-optimized structure.

KEYWORD:

• Rudder
• thermal flutter
• critical flutter speed
• variable stiffness laminate
• BJASCA

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 12172141).