A Customization Approach for Design Using Commercially Available Laminated Composite Materials

Composite materials can offer wide range of thermo-mechanical properties when designing load bearing components using them. The wide range of properties can be obtained by varying fiber-matrix volumetric ratio. Another advantage of using composite materials in design is that the directional properties of laminated composite materials can be easily manipulated by varying the angle of orientation with respect to the direction of the load. Theoretically it is possible to design composite laminates with any fiber-matrix ratio, and in any orientation. But in practice, only a selective number of laminates with given fiber volume fraction are produced and sold by the companies depending on their market demands. So, it is necessary for a designer to perform the selection of laminates from a list of available composite laminates to make it commercially viable. The manual selection process of composite laminates can be very cumbersome for the designers when multiple design goals need to be satisfied in the load bearing component that is being designed. This paper presents a new customization approach for design of load bearing components where appropriate unidirectional laminated composites can be selected to satisfy multiple property requirements. In this approach, a laminate customization technique is incorporated with a grammatical method that deals with a shape design technique, and loading analysis for the designed shape. A hip-replacement joint is designed using commercially available composite laminates to illustrate the approach.