Quantifying uncertainty in structural responses of polymer sandwich composites: a comparative analysis of neural networks

The manufacturing and fabrication of complex polymer sandwich composite plates involve various processes and parameters, and the lack of control over them causes uncertain system parameters. It is essential to consider randomness in varying parameters to analyse polymer sandwich composite plates. The present study portrays uncertainty quantification in structural responses (such as natural frequencies) of polymer sandwich composite plates using the surrogate model. The comparative study of artificial neural network (ANN) and polynomial neural network (PNN) for uncertain structural responses of the sandwich plate is presented. The proposed ANN as well as PNN algorithm is found to be convergent with intensive Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) for uncertain vibration responses. The predictability of PNN is observed to be more efficient than that of ANN. Typical material properties, skew angle, fibre orientation angle, number of laminate and core thickness are randomly varied to quantify the uncertainties. The use of both the surrogate models (PNN and ANN) results in a significant saving of computational time and cost compared to that of full-scale intensive finite element-based MCS approach.