DATE:

Friday, April 2, 2021

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

Virtual Zoom Conference

SPEAKER:

Wei Zhao, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Virginia Tech

ABSTRACT:

The advancements in both the computational capabilities and the manufacturing technologies allow us to employ nature-inspired stiffening members in aircraft wing skin panel design for improving structural performance. Nevertheless, these shape structures increase the complexity of the studied models, resulting in a highly complex modeling problem in design analysis when using traditional approaches. For a robust and cost-effective structural analysis, separating modeling approaches were proposed for modeling stiffening members and wing skin panels separately when using curved stringers and curved fiber path of tow-steered laminates. The local approximation method using finite element isoparametric shape function and the global approximation method using radial basis function in skin-stringer assembly are both studied. Curved stiffeners and tow steered laminates are able to tailor buckling mode shape and redistribute the in-plane load resultants, respectively, for improving buckling performance of structures subjected to both thermal and mechanical loads. Structural optimization was conducted to further demonstrate the benefit of using nature-inspired curvilinear stiffening members to design highly stiffness tailorable yet lightweight structures.

Bio: Dr. Wei Zhao is currently a Research Associate in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Virginia Tech in August 2017. Dr. Zhao’s research focus is on composite structures, inflatable wings, aeroelasticity and multidisciplinary design optimization. He has published 11 journal articles, 8 of them as the first-author, on aerospace structures and novel-concept airplane designs. In addition, he has published more than 20 conference papers in various American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) organized conferences; two of which were by invitation in the AIAA SciTech forum. His research work on composite airplane design has been reviewed in Aerospace America annual review in 2017 and 2019. Dr. Zhao is a professional member of AIAA. He has also chaired an AIAA SciTech 2021 forum session on composite structural design, analysis and tests. He is now serving as a topic editor on composite laminated structures for Journal of Composite Science.

HOST:

Satchi Venkataraman

VIDEO: