2009 Volume 57 Issue 665 Pages 244-251
Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) have been used in structural components for newly developed aircraft and spacecraft. The main structures of an airframe, such as the fuselage and wings, are essentially composed of stiffened panels. Therefore, in the structural design of airframes, it is important to evaluate the buckling strength of the composite stiffened panels. Widely used finite element method (FEM) can analyzed any stiffened panel shape with various boundary conditions. However, in the early phase of airframe development, many studies are required in structural design prior to carrying out detail drawing. In this phase, performing structural analysis using only FEM may not be very efficient. This paper describes a simple buckling analysis method for composite stiffened panels, which is based on finite strip method. This method can deal with isotropic and anisotropic laminated plates and shells with several boundary conditions. The accuracy of this method was verified by comparing it with theoretical analysis and FEM analysis (NASTRAN). It has been observed that the buckling coefficients calculated via the present method are in agreement with results found by detail analysis methods. Consequently, this method is designed to be an effective calculation tool for the buckling analysis in the early phases of airframe design.
