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

With the advances being made in manufacturing technology, it is now possible to manufacture panels with arbitrary curvilinear stiffeners. A plate with curvilinear stiffeners can, in some cases, yield a desired structural response but with a lower mass. In this paper, the element-free Galerkin method is employed for buckling and static analysis of stiffened plates. The formulation allows the placement of any number of arbitrary curvilinear stiffeners within a plate. The first-order shear deformation theory is used to model the behavior of the plate and the stiffener. Moving-least-squares approximation is used to construct the shape functions. One of the major difficulties in the implementation of some mesh-free methods is the imposition of essential boundary conditions, as the approximations do not pass through the nodal parameter values. In this research, the penalty method is used for satisfying the boundary conditions. A mesh-free method frees the user from providing a nodal line on the plate along every stiffener. This is very beneficial for performing optimization studies. Several numerical examples using both straight and curvilinear stiffeners are obtained and compared with those available in the literature and those obtained using ANSYS... This demonstrates the validity of the presented approach. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)