Transport industries look for CO2 impact reduction of their vehicles driven by the future environmental standards. A way to reach this goal is by replacing metallic parts by lighter composite parts. The prediction of the performance of the composite products remains a challenging task during the design process. The “micro-meso-macro” approach is often used to predict the composite products. Hom...

Ultrasonic guided waves inspection using Lamb waves is suitable for damage detection in metallic structures. This paper will present experimental results obtained using guided Lamb waves to detect flaws in aluminum specimens with design features applicable to space applications. Two aluminum panels were fabricated from a variable-thickness aluminum top plate, with two bolted I-beams edge stiffe...

This research presents the modeling and analysis for the buckling and postbuckling behavior of sandwich plates under thermal and mechanical loads. The lay-up configurations of plates are laminated composite with concentric stiffener and surface mounted piezoelectric actuators. The plates are in contact with a three-parameter elastic foundation including softening and/or hardening nonlinearity. ...

This paper investigates the tensile behaviour of prefabricated concrete-filled steel tube (PCFST) columns with bolted connections. Innovative column-column (BCC) connections are developed using standard structural bolts to simplify construction process for connection two PCFST columns, especially corner, edge, and interior columns. The BCC in under tension has been investigated, adopting finite...

This paper presents an experimental and computational study of four deployable reflectors with collapsible edge stiffeners, to verify the differences in behavior that had been predicted in a previous theoretical study. The experimental models have different geometric configurations and are made of two different plastics. Both folding experiments and vibration tests in the fully deployed configu...

Thin-shell deployable reflector structures that are folded elastically in a nearly inextensional mode have been recently realized, exploiting the recent availability of high-modulus, ultrathin composite materials. An inherent and significant limitation of this approach is that these structures remain “floppy” in their deployed configuration. This paper presents a general concept for increasing ...

Thin-shell deployable reflector structures that are folded elastically in a nearly-inextensional mode have been recently realized, exploiting the recent availability of high-modulus, ultra-thin composite materials. An inherent, and significant limitation of this approach is that these structures remain “floppy” in their deployed configuration. This paper presents a general concept for increasin...