ONGOING ACTIVITIES

The research activities of the NABUCCO group aim to enhance the efficiency of future aircraft and space structures by implementing composite materials and innovative concepts. Research areas include:

• Developing new concepts of adaptive and buckling-driven composite structures for next generation aircraft to utilize buckling drawbacks in a positive way, to conceive, design and realize adaptive composite structures and aircraft morphing wings.
• Analyzing pressure-adaptive composite structures designed to actively control post-buckling behavior through pneumatic pressure, enhancing structural stability and enabling advanced morphing applications.
• Experimentally investigating welded thermoplastic composite structures, and developing an experimentally-validated numerical approach to enhance the modelling of post-buckling behavior of welded thermoplastic composite stiffened panels.
• Analyzing the buckling and post-buckling behavior of composite interstage structures, providing design guidance, and validating the preliminary design of the proposed interstage configurations.
• Predicting the buckling response of composite-conical cylindrical shells, and aiding in future design guidelines and recommendations for launch-vehicle shell structures.
• Developing advanced meshless techniques for the linear and nonlinear analysis of composite shell-like structures.
• Modeling manufacturing defects using finite element simulations and machine learning techniques.

FUTURE PLANS

The future plans of the NABUCCO lab involve continuing research activities in the field, developing new design, analysis and testing methodologies for composite structures. These structures will be utilized for the next generation of aircraft and space vehicles, with a focus on enhancing structural integrity, improving efficiency and performance, and reducing overall weight. The NABUCCO lab will continue to focus on advancing the understanding of buckling behavior and damage resistance in composite materials to improve their reliability and durability, ensuring safer and more efficient aerospace structures.

ONGOING PROJECTS

1. ERC Advanced Grant | NABUCCO - New Adaptive and BUCkling-driven COmposite aerospace structures,
2. ESA | Buckling and Post-Buckling of Composite Primary Structures in New Generation Launchers
3. EOARD | A Comprehensive Investigation of Sustainable Welded Thermoplastic Post-Buckled Composite Structures
4. Leonardo Labs and PNRR | Scalability of local and global instability and damage tolerance of honeycomb sandwich composite structures
5. PNRR | Space It Up! - Spoke 2 WP2.4 Virtual reality for design, production, testing
6. PRIN2017 | DEVISU - DEvelopment and applications of a VIrtual hybrid platform for multiscale analysis of advanced StructUres of aircraft

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS 2022-2024

In the years 2022-2024 the NABUCCO group published 44 journal papers.

ERC KEYWORDS

• PE8-13 Lightweight construction, textile technology
• PE8-4 Computational Engineering
• PE8-1 Aerospace Engineering

SDGs COVERED

#4 - Quality Education
#5 - Gender Equality
#9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
#13 - Climate Action