Optimum Compliance Design of Stiffener Layout of Thin Plate : (A Treatment as Pseudocontinuous Structure)

An optimum design technique of a stiffener layout to achieve minimum compliance is developed. A design model of a thin plate with stiffeners is treated as an anisotropic pseudocontinuum and discretized into finite elements. The minimum compliance design problem subjected to constant volume in which the angles of the stiffener arrangement and its density distributions in the orthogonal directions are varied, is solved by a recursive quadratic programming technique. Optimal stiffener layouts of a rectangular plate under some typical loading and supporting conditions are obtained numerically.