Buckling and Static Analysis of Curvilinearly Stiffened Plates Using Mesh-Free Method

摘要

With the advances being made in manufacturing technology, it is now possible to manufacture panels withnarbitrary curvilinear stiffeners. A plate with curvilinear stiffeners can, in some cases, yield a desired structuralnresponse but with a lowermass. In this paper, the element-free Galerkinmethod is employed for buckling and staticnanalysis of stiffened plates. The formulation allows the placement of any number of arbitrary curvilinear stiffenersnwithin a plate. The first-order shear deformation theory is used to model the behavior of the plate and the stiffener.nMoving-least-squares approximation is used to construct the shape functions. One of the major difficulties in thenimplementation of somemesh-freemethods is the imposition of essential boundary conditions, as the approximationsndo not pass through the nodal parameter values. In this research, the penalty method is used for satisfying thenboundary conditions. A mesh-free method frees the user from providing a nodal line on the plate along everynstiffener. This is very beneficial for performing optimization studies. Several numerical examples using both straightnand curvilinear stiffeners are obtained and compared with those available in the literature and those obtained usingnANSYS®. This demonstrates the validity of the presented approach.