Thermally driven morphing with hybrid laminates and metal matrix composites

Analytical and experimental results are presented regarding thermally-driven morphing laminated shells. Owing to exploitation of the geometric nonlinearity of thin shells, they can demonstrate highly nonlinear displacement response to thermal loading, including multista- bility and snap-through behavior. In order to predict this behavior, an energy-based multi- stability model is proposed which utilizes experimentally-measured 1D thermally-induced curvatures as input parameters to determine the shell's 2D exural behavior. Experiments are conducted to measure the 1D curvatures in both hybrid CFRP-metal laminates, as well as high-temperature capable SiC/Ti metal matrix composites. Data from these exper- iments is used to predict the geometrically nonlinear response of thermally loaded shells, and results are compared with experiment using 3D digital image correlation. The poten- tial impact of this research is the realization of thermal and uid control devices capable of operating autonomously in extreme environments such as gas turbine engine cores..