Lightweight Mechanical and Aerospace Structures and Materials

Innovative manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing and auto fiber placement, have made it possible to fabricate high performance lightweight structures for mechanical and aerospace applications. Lightweight structures avoid excessive waste of raw materials and subsequently result in a reduced emission of greenhouse gases and increase energy efficiency. To enable wide applications of lightweight structures fabricated using these innovative manufacturing technologies, it is necessary to understand their structural performance under various operational environments. For example, static and vibration responses of thin-walled structures for wing skins and fuselage panels under aerodynamic loads, the crash behavior of helmet under impact load, stress and buckling response of the pipe vessel structures under hydrodynamic loadings, stress shielding of latticed hip arthroplasty stem structures, energy absorption of sandwich structures, etc. Composite/honeycomb/lattice structures, stiffened thin-walled metal structures, etc., have been widely used for these lightweight structure designs. Therefore, for a better lightweight structural design and subsequent efficient optimization studies, there is a need to develop high fidelity and efficient structural analysis approaches for studying linear and nonlinear responses of these innovative lightweight structures in practical applications.

This Research Topic will focus on using various analysis approaches in solid and structural mechanics to understand the mechanical performance of lightweight structures using analytical and semi-analytical approaches, finite element methods, and other numerical approaches. Potential authors are encouraged to publish research papers and overviews related to computational mechanics and integrated computational materials engineering to study the structural responses including material failure, static and dynamic stability, fatigue, etc., for these innovative lightweight structure design concepts.

The scope of this Research Topic includes but is not limited to:
• thin-walled structures;
• composite structures;
• cellular and lattice structures;
• functional graded materials;
• sandwich structures;
• stiffened structures;
• semi-analytical approach;
• finite element method;
• buckling and postbuckling analysis;
• static and vibration analysis;
• fatigue analysis;
• design, manufacturing, and test of lightweight structures