Abstract
Aluminum alloy plates are commonly used in automobile, train, aircraft and so on which 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 plate and thin shell structures with high stiffness. In this paper, shell structures which have the large second moment of area in arbitrary cross sectional dimensions was developed. The FEM analysis indicated that the developed shell structures made the weight of plates less than half under equivalent stiffness condition.
