Buckling optimization of laminated composite plate with elliptical cutout using ANN and GA

Buckling optimization of laminated composite plates is significant as they fail because of buckling under in-plane compressive loading. The plate is usually modeled without cutout so that the buckling strength is found analytically using classical laminate plate theory (CLPT). However in real world applications, the composite plates are modeled with cutouts for getting them assembled and to offer the provisions like windows, doors and control system. Finite element analysis (FEA) is used to analyze the buckling strength of the plate with cutouts and it leads to high computational cost when the plate is optimized. In this article, a genetic algorithm based optimization technique is used to optimize the composite plate with cutout. The computational time is highly reduced by replacing FEA with artificial neural network (ANN). The effectiveness of the proposed method is explored with two numerical examples.