• Carol Featherston, Cardiff University
• David Kennedy, Cardiff University
• Zhangming Wu, Cardiff University
• Abhishek Kundu, Cardiff University

Lightweight structures are increasingly important, particularly in the aerospace industry where reduced mass leads to more fuel efficient aircraft, lowering operating costs and reducing emissions. By improving our understanding and ability to predict the behaviour of these structures including the effects of large deformations and damage initiation and propagation we are able to consider for example the possibility of utilizing postbuckling reserves of strength allowing us to further reduce their mass.
Recent advances in optimisation techniques are enabling us to examine an ever more diverse range of designs. From the introduction of curved stiffeners to nature inspired fractal designs such as those obtained from topology optimisation these offer the opportunity to re-think our traditional perception of a lightweight plate structures.
The level of complexity involved in such models however can make them computationally expensive to use, particularly when we take uncertainty in terms of the geometry and the loading applied into account. This is exacerbated when we consider optimisation processes which may require thousands of analyses to reach a converged solution.
This minisymposium will address all aspects of the design and optimisation of lightweight structures using digital twins to maximise performance by generating and predicting the performance of ever more efficient layouts.
Keywords - Lightweight structures, Digital Twin, Optimisation, Uncertainty