The design of blended laminates regardless of the stack: The search propagation direction

Handling blending constraint, a fundamental manufacturing requirement for the design of composite structures made of laminates with different thickness, is a hard task. A rigorous methodology to construct blended laminates regardless of the orientation value and of the position of the dropped plies within the laminates is presented and justified from a mathematical perspective in this work. The concept at the basis of the methodology is referred to as search propagation direction. It allows for a net simplification of the stack recovery phase. Since blending is automatically satisfied between adjacent laminates, the problem is reduced to determine orientation values, in analogy to the stack recovery problem for a single laminate.