Design, Manufacturing and Testing of a Variable Stiffness Composite Cylinder for Improved Bending Induced Buckling Performance

Fiber steering is one of the promising capabilities of automated fiber placement (AFP) technology in manufacturing of advanced composite structures. In this work we design, manufacture and test a variable stiffness (VS) composite cylinder made by fiber steering. The bending-induced buckling performance of the VS cylinder is compared with its quasi-isotropic (QI) counterpart to investigate the improvement of the buckling capacity.