Abstract
Stiffened thin steel plates are structures widely employed in aeronautical, civil, naval, and offshore engineering. Considering a practical application where a transverse uniform load acts on a simply supported stiffened steel plate, an approach associating computational modeling, Constructal Design method, and Exhaustive Search technique was employed aiming to minimize the central deflections of these plates. To do so, a non-stiffened plate was adopted as reference from which all studied stiffened plate’s geometries were originated by the transformation of a certain amount of steel of its thickness into longitudinal and transverse stiffeners. Different values for the stiffeners volume fraction (φ) were analyzed, representing the ratio between the volume of the stiffeners’ material and the total volume of the reference plate. Besides, the number of longitudinal (Nls) and transverse (Nts) stiffeners and the aspect ratio of stiffeners shape (hs/ts, being hs and ts, respectively, the height and thickness of stiffeners) were considered as degrees of freedom. The optimized plates were determined for all studied φ values and showed a deflection reduction of over 90% in comparison with the reference plate. Lastly, the influence of the φ parameter regarding the optimized plates was evaluated defining a configuration with the best structural performance among all analyzed cases.
Highlights
According to Timoshenko and Gere [1], thin plates are plane structural components that have one dimension, called thickness, substantially smaller than the other dimensions
ANSYS® was performed in order to evaluate its capability in determining the central deflection of stiffened plates under a uniformly distributed transverse load
We presented and discussed in detail a new computational method employed for modeling of thin steel plates with stiffeners subjected to uniform transverse loads
Summary
According to Timoshenko and Gere [1], thin plates are plane structural components that have one dimension, called thickness, substantially smaller than the other dimensions. Structural elements containing plates are employed in different engineering sectors, such as automotive, aerospace, naval, and civil. Due to the slenderness of the plates (i.e., these elements are thin, having a low bending stiffness and a short resistance against transverse and longitudinal moments) the necessity of incorporating beam structures in order to enhance the bending stiffness has been noted [2]. Different manufacturing processes can be used to obtain stiffened steel plates. The modern stiffened panels used for the fuselage of aerospace industry have been manufactured by Electromagnetic forming (EMF), as explained in Tan et al [4,5]
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