With the increasing use of composite materials in Mechanical and Aerospace industries, an approach is required to facilitate designing of components using composite materials, while ensuring customization of the shape such a way that multiple design goals for the components are satisfied. Existing design methods may be used in some cases, where the component shape and loadings are simple. While a significant amount of research has been conducted to study the properties of composite materials, little attention has been paid to find out a design approach such that (1) the user requirements in the very general form may be used directly and as the input for the design, (2) the best possible composite material are selected to meet multiple desired functions, and (3) shape variation is analyzed in order to enable mass customization of the design. Thus an approach is required that will be able to handle both the shape and the material in order to design a load bearing component using composite materials. In this research the focus is to develop a design approach that will consider the user requirements for a composite component in its very general form and generate component shape and material details in a systematic order so that the designed component can withstand a given loading condition.

Consequently, the Primary Research Question is:

How to simultaneously explore shape and composite materials during the design of a product to meet multiple property and functional goals?

The wide range of properties, covered by various fiber-matrix combinations, along with their directional property characteristics, maximizes the flexibility of the designers, while designing composite material products. Meeting multiple property goals, however, complicates the design process as both the composite material selection and the component shape formation becomes highly intricate with the loading conditions and a number of matrix calculations needs to be performed to determine theoretical value of composite material properties.

A grammar is a formal definition of a language written in transformational form. To address these issues, in this research a grammatical approach is developed that will generate a shape grammar to perform shape optimization, and then incorporate a composite material selection system and loading analysis techniques of Solid Mechanics in order to design load bearing components of irregular shape.

The approach will be able to consider the user requirements in the very general text form, convert them to the design requirements for the component, generate optimized shape based on multiple design constraints, perform the complete design work, and generate the component.

The major contributions include: (1) generating a shape grammar to represent functions of the load bearing component such a way that mass-customization of shape is possible, (2) developing a composite material customization system in order to satisfy directional property requirements, and (3) introducing a unique laminate design approach in order to satisfy design property requirements at the critical cross-sections locally that can result in highly efficient design compared to conventional design method. Verification of the approach will focus on its application to simultaneously explore shapes and customization of composite materials.