Performance Analysis of Radial Basis Function Metamodels for Predictive Modelling of Laminated Composites

High-fidelity structural analysis using numerical techniques, such as finite element method (FEM), has become an essential step in design of laminated composite structures. Despite its high accuracy, the computational intensiveness of FEM is its serious drawback. Once trained properly, the metamodels developed with even a small training set of FEM data can be employed to replace the original FEM model. In this paper, an attempt is put forward to investigate the utility of radial basis function (RBF) metamodels in the predictive modelling of laminated composites. The effectiveness of various RBF basis functions is assessed. The role of problem dimensionality on the RBF metamodels is studied while considering a low-dimensional (2-variable) and a high-dimensional (16-variable) problem. The effect of uniformity of training sample points on the performance of RBF metamodels is also explored while considering three different sampling methods, i.e., random sampling, Latin hypercube sampling and Hammersley sampling. It is observed that relying only on the performance metrics, such as cross-validation error that essentially reuses training samples to assess the performance of the metamodels, may lead to ill-informed decisions. The performance of metamodels should also be assessed based on independent test data. It is further revealed that uniformity in training samples would lead towards better trained metamodels.