Natural frequency optimization of composite plates with cutouts

This study presents two complementary computational approaches for optimizing the natural frequencies of laminated composite plates with cutouts. The first approach employs Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to explore a combined design space including ply angles, hole center location (x c , y c ), and hole radius R for laminated composite plates with circular cutouts. Ply orientations are treated as continuous variables within −90 ∘ ,90 ∘ and rounded to integer values, while geometric constraints ensure that the cutout remains within the plate boundaries. The second approach introduces a finite-element pre-processing technique, termed Adjacent Element Temperature Driven Prestress (AETDP), which constructs a temperature-induced prestress field directly from the mesh adjacency graph using a breadth-first search algorithm. This enables efficient prestressed modal analysis without coupled thermo-mechanical simulations. Validation against numerical and experimental benchmarks shows mean absolute errors below 8%. Optimization results indicate that optimal cutout locations tend to align with modal nodal lines, reducing stiffness loss, while highly constrained plates tolerate larger cutouts. The AETDP approach reduces computational time significantly compared with full PSO optimization.