Memetic Computing Applied to the Design of Composite Materials and Structures

Presently, there exists an important need for lighter and more resistant structures, with reduced manufacturing costs. Laminated polymers are materials which respond to these new demands. Main difficulties of the design process of a composite laminate include the necessity to design both the geometry of the element and the material configuration itself and, therefore, the possibilities of creating composite materials are almost unlimited. Many techniques, ranging from linear programming or finite elements to computational intelligence, have been used to solve this type of problems. The aim of this work is to show that more effective and dynamic methods to solve this type of problems are obtained by using certain techniques based on systematic exploitation of knowledge of the problem, together with the combination of metaheuristics based on population as well as on local search. With this objective, a memetic algorithm has been designed and compared with the main heuristics used in the design of laminated polymers in different scenarios. All solutions obtained have been validated by the ANSYS® software package.