A Reduced Order Model for Static and Buckling Analysis of Thin-Walled Stiffened Plate on a Non-Conformal Mesh

Abstract

Abstract Thin-walled stiffened plates can be susceptible to buckling-induced instability failures. An accurate and efficient model is essential for optimizing stiffener size and shape and analyzing buckling while considering geometric complexity, location, loading, and boundary conditions. A full-scale finite element analysis (FEA) was previously employed to determine the buckling load of the stiffened plate during the stiffener shape and size optimization. A non-conformal mesh method based on an inverse isoparametric mapping algorithm (IIMA) was developed recently to model stiffened plates with complex-shaped stiffeners keeping the base plate unchanged. Built on this work, this paper presents a reduced order modeling (ROM) approach to accelerate the static and buckling analysis of the stiffened plate. The principle is to use the base plate’s free-vibration modal shapes to estimate its displacement and link the ROM of the base plate with stiffeners through displacement compatibility at the interface. ROM is used again to approximate the eigenvalues in the buckling analysis of the stiffened plate. The proposed ROM approaches turned out to be accurate and significantly reduce computational time compared to full-scale FEA.