Abstract
Aluminum alloy plates are commonly used in automobile, train, aircraft and so on where lightweight is required. However, lower costs and lighter weight materials are demanded. In order to satisfy the demand for lightweight without changing the material, it is necessary to raise the second moment of area to increase stiffness. The purpose of this study is creating isotropic thin shell structures to increase the stiffness of aluminum alloy plates. In this paper, shell structures which have the large second moment of area in arbitrary cross sectional dimensions were developed. FEM results and experimental results indicated that the developed shell structures made the weight of plates less than half under equivalent stiffness condition.
