OPTIMAL STRUCTURAL DAMPING OF SKIS USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM

Two problems of the optimal damping of skis with the use of an improved genetic algorithm (GA) are presented. The first problem is the optimal location of viscoelastic constrained layers; the second problem is the optimization of the stacking sequence with or without variable layer thicknesses. It is demonstrated that the GA is a very attractive and powerful method for these problems in which the objective function has no derivatives and several optimal solutions simultaneously exist.