Patent Document ID: 10140388
Application ID: 14542626
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of manufacturing a composite laminate, comprising: performing steps (a) through (h) in a finite element analysis program executed by a processor of a computer: a) computing a normalized set of lamination parameters and laminate stiffness matrices of an initial laminate design of the composite laminate based on an initial laminate thickness; b) generating a finite element model of the composite laminate; c) determining optimum values for the laminate thickness and corresponding optimum values of the lamination parameters based on the normalized set of lamination parameters and laminate stiffness matrices and the initial laminate thickness, and based on at least one of strength constraints and stiffness constraints associated with a loading condition applied to the finite element model when determining the optimum values for the laminate thickness and the corresponding optimum values of the lamination parameters; d) adjusting an optimum value of the laminate thickness; e) performing an inversion process extracting multiple solutions from the optimum values of the lamination parameters, each solution representing an optimized design model of the composite laminate at an adjusted laminate thickness and including a unique set of individual fiber angles for each ply of the optimized design model of the composite laminate; f) selecting from the multiple solutions a preferred solution for the optimized design model of the composite laminate based on lamination layup criteria; g) performing a design verification of the preferred solution to determine if margin of safety requirements are met; h) repeating steps (c) through (g) until an optimized design model is obtained that meets the margin of safety requirements; and laying up the composite laminate in an optimum laminate thickness and with optimum fiber angles according to the optimized design model.