Structural Design Optimization of Composite Laminates

The aim of this paper is to suggest a method by which a range of materials may be in cluded in the process of optimization of composite laminate structures. The motivation for this paper comes from the fact that in most cases, the optimization begins with a given material and is limited to finding the ply angles for optimizing an objective function like weight or cost. By the use of dimensionless parameters, it has been shown that it is possi ble to include the material selection process within the optimization scheme.