Optimization of a Filament Wound Hybrid Metal Composite Railway Axle Design Concept

This paper presents a numerical design method to develop a mass-minimised winding sequence for carbon fiber reinforced tubes to be manufactured by filament winding. This method combines the use of Altair Optistruct Finite Element Solver and CADWIND V9 CAM software to develop a winding sequence able to implicitly compensate for the loss of stiffness due to fiber intertwining. Hence, it was specifically built to solve a stiffness-driven mass optimization design task of a hybrid metal composite railway axle, in which the design constraints were imposed by a previously developed design solution. However, in theory it could be applied to the design of composite shafts for various applications.