Abstract
The plate and shell structures with stiffeners are frequently adopted to acheive large and ligh structures. A new design technique called "growth method", which acheives a minimum compliance design, is suggested to obtain optimal layout pattern of the stiffeners for the thin-walled structures. The growth method starts from seed points, and grows gradually the stiffeners along the grid nodes of the finite element in every interation. The method is applied to decide optimum layouts of stiffeners for square plates undr distributed and concentrated loads.
