Analysis of curved composite structures through refined 1D finite elements with aerospace applications

This paper presents a novel approach to deal with the analysis of composite aerospace structures with curved sections. The Carrera Unified Formulation is exploited to create hierarchical high-order beam models capable of detecting both local and global mechanical behaviors of composite structures. The blending function method is applied to introduce the exact shape of the cross-section boundaries into the mapping functions. Problems at both microstructure scale (fiber-matrix system) and macrostructure scale (whole components) can be studied with no lack of generalization. Several numerical examples of aerospace structures are included and the results are compared against those from the literature, as well as solid solutions obtained through the commercial software MSC Nastran. From this study, it is clear than the present formulation has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for the study of composite structures, enabling to obtain complex 3D-like solutions with a substantial reduction in the computational costs.