Buckling Optimization of Curved Grid Stiffeners through the Level Set Based DensityMethod.

Stiffened structures have great potential for improvingmechanical performance, and the study of their stability is of great interest. In this paper, the optimization of the critical buckling load factor for curved grid stiffeners is solved by using the level set based density method, where the shape and cross section (including thickness and width) of the stiffeners can be optimized simultaneously. The grid stiffeners are a combination ofmany single stiffenerswhich are projected by the corresponding level set functions. The thickness and width of each stiffener are designed to be independent variables in the projection applied to each level set function. Besides, the path of each single stiffener is described by the zero iso-contour of the level set function. All the single stiffeners are combined together by using the p-norm method to obtain the stiffener grid. The proposed method is validated by several numerical examples to optimize the critical buckling load factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]