MechE Colloquium: Design of composite materials and structures across the scales: physical and data-driven models

Abstract: The ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions in aviation by 2050 can only be met by science-based disruptive innovations, including those that have the potential to reduce aircraft structural weight. Based on the hypothesis that composite materials and structures are currently not used to their full potential, a vision of a systems approach for the inverse design of composite materials and structures across different spatial scales will be presented. The main building blocks of the proposed approach, linking the macrostructure of a composite structure to the microstructure of a composite material, will be discussed. At the micromechanical level, these include the generation of representative volume elements, appropriate material models for the constituents, reduced order models and associated surrogates. A recently developed mesomechanical modelling approach that simulates the propagation of the different failure mechanisms observed in composite laminates under finite strains using a new homogenization-based smeared crack formulation will be discussed. At the structural level, building on data generated analytically and on reduced representations of composite lay-ups, four machine learning algorithms are used to predict the strength of composite laminates with notches of several geometries and the corresponding statistical distribution, associated to material and geometrical variability. It will be shown that the proposed approach may lead to significant reductions of the time required to virtually certify composite aircraft structures.

Biography: Prof. Pedro Camanho (FRAeS) received his PhD in Composite Materials from the Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London, UK, in 1999. He is currently Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Porto. Pedro Camanho is the President of the Associated Laboratory in Energy, Transportation and Aeronautics, and member of the Editorial Board of multiple international journals. The main research interests of Pedro Camanho are the mechanics of deformation and fracture of advanced polymer composite materials, and new concepts for lightweight composite materials and structures for aerospace applications such as hybrid, nano-structured, multi-functional, variable-stiffness, morphing, energy-storage and ultra-thin composites. Pedro Camanho was Visiting Scientist at NASA-Langley Research Center and at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. He was Visiting Professor at Imperial College London, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Cambridge University and Brown University. Pedro Camanho is the recipient of the 2006 NASA - H.J.E. Reid Award for Outstanding Scientific Paper. He also received the 2020 Excellence in Research Award of the University of Porto, and the Career Award from the Portuguese Society of Fatigue and Structural Integrity. Pedro Camanho was elected in 2023 as member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.