Stiffener Layout Generation of Plate and Shell Structures by Pseudo-Growth Technique

Abstract

Plate and shell structures with stiffeners are frequently adopted to acheive huge and light structures. A new design technique so called as growth method, which acheives a minimum compliance design, is suggested to obtain optimal layout pattern of the stiffeners for the plate and shell structures. The growth method starts from seed points distributed in advance, and grows gradually the stiffener layout along the grid nodes of the finite element by taking into account the design sensitivity of stiffener cross section. The method is applied to decide optimum layouts of stiffeners for square plates undr distributed and concentrated loads, and validity of the suggested technique is discussed.