CryoTMLA - Thermo-mechanical Laminate Analysis Tool

Kurzfassung

With the ongoing environmental concerns, as well as the rise in the price of crude oil, the world is changing towards a more environmental neutral operation. The aeronautical industry is not an exception and thus more and more investment is being put towards the development of new fuels, emissions reducing and fuel saving technologies. LH2 is by no means a new fuel, however only now is it starting to be employed in commercial and civil aviation aircraft with environmental concerns in mind. This fuel needs to be stored at a temperature below its boiling point, around 20K. This, coupled with aviations structural mass saving requirements, leads to the need of studying the thermal effects of these cryogenic temperatures on fibre reinforced polymers structures. This internship task was to implement, verify and validate a structural design and analysis Python tool for composite structures under thermal and mechanical loads, integrated with DLRs multidisciplinary optimisation tool lightWORKS with the objective to design the internal structure of aircraft LH2 fuel tanks. The tool will then be used to outline some basic design rules for composite laminates under thermo-mechanical loading.