In today's world, speed to market and cost are major drivers for every product development process in an organization. Utilization of tools like Design of experiments, Topology optimization combined with finite element analysis will help in reducing the complexity, cost and product life cycle of structural components without compromising the structural strength. Perforated plates have found variety of applications in structural members and various studies have been conducted on perforated plate with lateral load and effect of cut out shapes on the strength. As the cutouts in such plates induces stress concentration, it is important to study the effect of parameters like plate thickness, hole diameter, spacing of perforation on the strength of these plates. The objective is to study the effect of mainly three parameters, hole diameter, plate thickness and hole pattern on stress. Design of experiment methodology is applied to list out all possible combinations for these parameters. FEA results for all 144 combinations is analyzed and experimental verification is done for 3 combinations. From the results of DOE and Finite element analysis, a generalized equation was established correlating effects of hole diameter, plate thickness, hole pattern for sensitivity analysis. It is found that plate thickness has major effect on stress and deformation followed by hole spacing in direction perpendicular to bolting face. The effect of hole diameter is minimal.

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