Design tool for tow-steered composite laminates in Abaqus and MSC.Patran/Nastran

Tow-steered composites with curvilinear fiber paths offer enhanced mechanical performance in lightweight structures. However, the absence of commercial design tools for tow-steered composite structures limits innovation in their design for real-world applications. This paper introduces a user-friendly Design tool for Advanced Tailorable Composites (DATC), providing an integrated design framework in two widely used commercial finite element (FE) software packages, Abaqus and MSC.Patran/Nastran. DATC offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to connect multiscale plate modeling, FE modeling, machine learning (ML) modeling, and design optimization. The GUI streamlines the design process by managing all design configurations and interacting with several external codes. The multiscale modeling code SwiftComp calculates effective plate stiffness based on the steering fiber angles. The ML module trains efficient surrogate models as an alternative to FE models to reduce computational costs. The optimization module employs the open-source code Dakota to iteratively perform FE analysis with updated design variables, multiscale plate modeling, and optimization. The paper demonstrates the user-friendliness and adaptability of DATC through three case studies of tow-steered composite structures.