Simulative Design of a Load-Path Adapted Fibre Reinforced Composite (FRP) Transporter Rear Door

The demand for weight reduction in the automotive, aerospace, and railway industries is at an all-time high. Fibre-reinforced composites (FRC) have proved their suitability with their excellent combination of strength and weight. The only limiting factor in adapting FRC for mass-production in industries is the high costs of composite materials like carbon fibre reinforced plastics. A design workflow, suitable for FRC’s and their available manufacturing technologies has been proposed by adopting a progressive approach. A multi-material component design has been optimized using Altair Hyperworks and OptiStruct to reduce weight and maintain stiffness and strength as compared to its conventional metallic version. The layup of the substrate laminate has been optimized using special optimization tools in OptiStruct in three stages. The determination of load-paths is followed by the optimization of the base laminate under given load cases. Subsequently, the geometry of injection-moulded stiffeners was determined by employing topology optimization considering the composite layup, obtained in previous steps.