Cantilever Box-Beam Application of Composite Stacking Sequence Optimization Using Adaptive Genetic Algorithm

Composite materials due to their high stiffness to mass ratio as well as their anisotropic properties are the material of choice for many different weight critical structures such as wind turbine blades. Wind turbine blades have been modeled as composite cantilever box-beams for optimization purposes. The use of Genetic Algorithms (GA) has become a fairly common practice for optimization of composite laminates, where the objective is to find a laminate stacking sequence that optimizes the composite for a given condition. The purpose of this work is to study further adaptations to the GA search technique for use in the composite laminate stacking sequence optimization problem. In this work an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (AGA) is studied for the stacking sequence optimization of a composite box-beam.