Lightweight design of arcuately stiffened cylindrical shells based on smeared stiffener method and active learning strategy

Abstract

The lightweight design of stiffened cylindrical shells has always been a key area of research for the aerospace industry, owing to its considerable economic benefits. In this study, a novel arcuately stiffened cylindrical shell, which aims to utilize the potential of the axial bearing capacity effectively, is proposed based on the concept of synchronous failure. Subsequently, the smeared stiffener method is derived by using the equivalent stiffness, and the critical buckling load is predicted accurately. Furthermore, the lightweight designs for the perfect and imperfect stiffened cylindrical shells are established, and an objective-pursuing learning method is proposed to reduce the computational cost by combining the advantages of the smeared stiffener method and Kriging model. The results showed that the arcuately stiffened cylindrical shell is very efficient, and the proposed objective-pursuing learning method exhibited high efficiency for optimization design.