Invited Speaker

Abstract: Structural lightweight design is a critical technical indicator in the aerospace and new energy power equipment industries. The adoption of new materials, innovative structural configurations, and advanced manufacturing processes serves as the primary approach to achieving structural lightweighting. Fiber-reinforced composites, with their exceptional material properties and designable microstructures, have become an ideal material and structural form for lightweighting and functionalization in these fields. In particular, the rapid development of continuous fiber additive manufacturing technology in recent years has enabled the practical realization of multi-scale optimization designs for fiber-reinforced composites. Building on the rapid progress in structural and multidisciplinary optimization theories and methods, significant advancements have been made in composite optimization and engineering applications. However, the multi-scale optimization design of continuous fiber-reinforced composites, which holds greater potential for lightweighting and functionalization, still faces numerous challenges, especially when considering the integrated "material-structure-manufacturing" design. These challenges include the "curse of dimensionality" in discrete design variables, "reduction of design space," "uncertainty in feasible domains," "dependence on initial trajectory assumptions," and "difficulties in the concurrent characterization of structural topology and fiber trajectories." This report systematically presents recent research progress by our team in the field of multi-scale optimization design for fiber-reinforced composites, including multi-scale variable stiffness optimization design for discrete fiber composites, multi-material multi-scale variable stiffness optimization design for fiber-reinforced composites, stress-constrained multi-scale topology optimization design for composites, and multi-scale optimization design incorporating multi-point shape-preserving constraints. These contributions aim to provide innovative methodologies for the lightweight design of advanced composite structures in aerospace applications.

Biography: Dr. Zunyi Duan, Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Northwestern Polytechnical University, specializes in theoretical and applied research of advanced composite material structures, multidisciplinary optimization design, and "material-structure-manufacturing" integrated optimization for composite additive manufacturing. He has led multiple national research projects, including NSFC grants and sub-projects of China's Key R&D Programs. With 43 peer-reviewed publications (37 SCI-indexed, 650+ citations) in top journals such as Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, and Composite Structures, he holds 14 disclosed patents (6 authorized). Dr. Duan serves as a youth editor for the Journal of Computational Mechanics and Materials, and holds committee roles in the Chinese Composite Materials Society and Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society. His achievements have been recognized with several awards, including the First Prize in Natural Science from the Chinese Society for Composite Materials (as second contributor), and the Second Prize of the Shaanxi Higher Education Research Excellence Award (as first contributor).