On design of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) laminated structure with different failure criteria

•Different failure modes in terms of the Hashin, Hoffman and Tsai-Wu failure criteria are imposed as constraint functions•Different failure criteria result in different topological configurations of CFRP, including both the ply orientations and material thickness layout•Of these three failure criteria considered, the Tsai-Wu criterion is found most conservative whilst the Hashin counterpart is least•From the perspective of maximum failure index, the best strength performance appears in the structure based upon the Tsai-Wu criterion This study develops a topology optimization approach for design of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) laminated components with different failure criteria to reduce the risk of structural failure. The discrete material and thickness optimization (DMTO) method is adopted to parameterize the design variables of thickness and orientation of CFRP composites, which is driven by the Method of Moving Asymptote (MMA) algorithm. A large number of local constraints associated with the failure criteria are aggregated in terms of a p-norm function. Analytical sensitivities are derived with respect to the design variables. In this study, a battery hanging structure in electrical vehicle (EV) is exemplified; and a DMTO based design is prototyped and validated through the in-house experimental tests first. To prevent different failure modes, the Hashin, Hoffman and Tsai-Wu failure criteria are then imposed as the design constraints together with manufacturing requirements in the optimization. A comparative study is performed for the design with and without such failure criteria. The results demonstrate that the maximum failure index of the optimized structure with the Tsai-Wu failure criterion decreases the most by 40%; and follows by the Hashin and Hoffman criteria by 24% and 33%, respectively. Finally, the CFRP structure is also optimized to design a so-called double-double laminates for demonstrating the generality of the proposed method. The study is anticipated to gain in-depth understanding of how the failure criteria would affect the design of fiber reinforced composite structures to ensure structural integrity. [Display omitted]