With rising demand to develop versatile composite materials for modern applications, computer-based solutions to arrive at the material characteristics are now preferred. This necessity is due to the large cost involved for the nanoadditives, as well as elaborate and precise setups required for detailed load tests or experiments. Even with the numerical simulations, considerable information has to arrive from experiments for these highly nonlinear viscoelastic materials. Stress accumulation and relaxation are important aspects that need prediction before considering composites for applications. Being a relatively new engineering domain, the significant information to use commercial codes like Ansys®, MSC®, or Abaqus® are now scattered in literature and the solvers themselves are still evolving. Our attempt through this work is to provide a comprehensive basic set of information on the same, while using Ansys® for arriving at the material characteristics of Thermoplastic Polyurethane-Carbon Nanotube (TPU-CNT) polymer composite. A simulation procedure to study stress relaxation behavior with Maxwell’s Prony relaxation parameters is detailed, suitability of incorporating basic hyperelastic models, such as Mooney–Rivlin and Ogden available in the solver, is compared, and the influence of coefficient of friction (COF) in the numerical simulations is investigated. On appropriate validation with available experimental results, we found that hyper-viscoelastic model is best suited for TPU-CNT with maximum error as low as 5% during stress relaxation phase (for 1800 s), in comparison with 15% and 25% for viscoelastic and hyperelastic models. During the short loading phase of the material, none of the models are accurate. The two-parameter first-order equation-based Mooney–Rivlin model fed with uniaxial load test information was satisfactory for low strain predictions in comparison with higher-order Ogden model. COF is found to significantly affect the solution, and a value of about 0.3 was found suitable for the present 0.05% TPU-CNT composite. Further, we present the transient stress contours to show how the stress relaxation within the composite material would be predicted with each model.

A carbon fibre reinforced polymer is designed for NACA0012 airfoil wing using a finite element model to determine the stresses and deformation by considering the aerodynamic loads from wind tunnel testing. The composite airfoil is designed for the use in morphing wings which are known to increase the aerodynamic efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper deals with the design procedures of modelling a composite wing using different design variables in conformance to the first order shear deformation theory using ANSYS® 19.2 and optimizing the design by using a fourth degree polynomial found by surface fitting and genetic algorithm in MATLAB® R2020a. The analysis is carried out on 125 samples consisting of different materials, orientation and thickness. The pressure loads found from the wind tunnel testing was converted using weighted average method and applied in ANSYS® 19.2. While designing the airfoil, monocoque concept is used for structural integrity and this is implemented by the usage of Styrene acrylonitrile at the leading and trailing edges which has high strength to weight ratio. The composite laminae with a certain orientation and thickness is found to have the lowest deformation of 158 nm in response to the aerodynamic load.

Numerical investigation on the aerodynamic characteristics of an optimised NACA0012 aerofoil in-ground effect (IGE) has been performed. Gradient-based shape optimisation was carried out using the ANSYS® 19.0 Adjoint Solver to augment lift over drag ratio (L/D) by at least 10%, at various heights and angles of attack. SST k-ω turbulence model was chosen for the simulations, after its validation for out-of-ground effect (OGE) and performing wind tunnel tests for IGE. While the desired target of 10% increase in the performance parameter was easily achieved through optimisation at low angles of attack (α < 6°), the frozen turbulence assumption in Adjoint Solver limited large shape alterations at higher angles of attack. Upper surface of the aerofoil had larger changes from original camber when compared to the lower surface. Also, the optimised profiles had significant modifications towards x/c ≥ 0.8. This signifies the suitability of trailing edge morphing for such applications.