Buckling and Static Analysis of Curvilinearly Stiffened Plates Using Mesh-Free Method

With the advancement s being made in manufactu ring technology, it is now possible to manufacture panels with arbitrary curvilinear stiffeners. A plate with curvilinear stiffener s can in some cases yield a desired structural response but with a lower mass . In this paper , the Element Free Galerkin (EFG) method is employed for buckling and static analysis of stiffened plates. The formulation allows the placeme nt of any number of arbitrarily curvilinear stiffeners within a plate. The First Order Shear Deformation Theory (FSDT) is used to model the behav ior of the plate and the stiffener . Moving Least Squares (MLS) approximation is used to construct the shape function s. One of the major difficulties in the implementation of some mesh free methods is the imposition of essential boundary conditions as the appro ximations do not pass through the nodal parameter values. In this research , the penalty method is used for satisfying the boundary conditions. Using a meshfree method sets free the user from providing a nodal line on the plate along every stiffener. This i s very beneficial for performing optimization studies. Several numerical examples using both straight and curvilinear stiffener s are obtained and compared with those available in the literature and those obtained using ANSYS ® . This demonstrate s the validit y of th e presented approach .