Artificial immune system for optimal design of composite hydrogen storage vessel

Based on the clonal selection principle in the biological immunology, an artificial immune system (AIS) is proposed to optimize the weight of Al-carbon fiber/epoxy composite hydrogen storage vessels under burst pressure constraint. The AIS simulates the generation of the antigens, the combination of the antigens and antibodies, and the selection, cloning and hypermutation of B cells, the maintenance of diverse antibody cells, the generation of the memory cells with high affinities and the death of the antibody cells with low affinities. Effects of the antibody size and the iterative number on the optimization results are explored. By comparison, the AIS shows higher search velocity and precision than the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.