Frequency optimization of laminated functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced composite quadrilateral plates using smoothed FEM and evolution algorithm

The paper presents an efficient numerical optimization approach to deal with the optimization problem for maximizing the fundamental frequency of laminated functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite quadrilateral plates. The proposed approach is a combination of the cell-based smoothed discrete shear gap method (CS-DSG3) for analyzing the first natural frequency of the functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced composite plates and a global optimization algorithm, namely adaptive elitist differential evolution algorithm (aeDE), for solving the optimization problem. The design variables are the carbon nanotube orientation in the layers and constrained in the range of integer numbers belonging to [-90(0) 90(0)]. Several numerical examples are presented to investigate optimum design of quadrilateral laminated functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced composite plates with various parameters such as carbon nanotube distribution, carbon nanotube volume fraction, boundary condition and number of layers.