Skin-Stringer Assembly Using Radial Basis Functions for Curvilinearly Stiffened Panels

Additive manufacturing enables the deposition of material in the near-net shape at any desired location on the base plate or shell to improve the structural performance by tailoring the buckling and/or vibration mode shapes. In this study, a stiffened plate with arbitrarily shaped stiffeners is modeled using a nonconformal mesh-based finite element model. Six degrees of freedom are considered for each node of the plate and the stiffener finite element models to enable the couplings between the plate’s and stiffeners’ in-plane and out-of-plane motions. Displacement compatibility is enforced at the interface between the plate and the stiffeners where several skin–stringer connection approaches, including inverse isoparametric mapping algorithm (IIMA), radial basis function, and thin-plate spline function, are used. Various complex models available in the literature are employed for evaluating the skin–stringer connection approaches. Research studies show that the IIMA-based nonconformal mesh modeling can generate a sparse displacement approximation matrix, which makes it an efficient approach for nonconformal mesh-based modeling. For the stiffened plate with higher stiffeners, the present results agree well with those obtained from the Abaqus/CAE conventional conformal mesh and mesh tie constraint-based nonconformal mesh modeling results, but yield better results than the Abaqus/CAE wrapping mesh approach.

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Energy Element Method for Three-Dimensional Vibration Analysis of Stiffened Plates with Complex Geometries

Jing

2024

AIAA Journal

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A novel numerical method, the energy element method, is proposed for the three-dimensional vibration analysis of stiffened plates with complex geometries. The problem is modeled in a cuboidal domain, and a cuboidal energy element is developed for the simulation of the structural components. To simulate the energy distribution of the structure, stiffened plates are treated as discrete energy systems, where variable stiffness is used to characterize their energy distribution in a cuboidal domain and a global admissible function is used to approximate their vibrational behavior. With extended interval integral, Gauss quadrature, variable stiffness, and Legendre polynomials used for numerical integration in the cuboidal domain, the cuboidal energy element can offer sufficient precision with sufficient Gauss points for simulating the strain energy of stiffened plates with complex geometries. The Gauss–Legendre quadrature will provide accurate integration results if the integral domain is cuboidal. Otherwise, small cuboidal energy elements are generated with denser Gauss points to capture the geometric boundaries. As the numerical model is constructed on a standard geometric domain, all energy functionals and computational procedures are standard. Three-dimensional vibration problems are investigated for variously shaped stiffened plates with straight or curvilinear stiffeners. The present results are compared with analytical, numerical, and experimental results published in the literature.

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Skin-Stringer Assembly Using Radial Basis Functions for Curvilinearly Stiffened Panels

Cited by 5 publications

References 29 publications

Buckling optimization of Double-Double (DD) laminates with gradual thickness tapering

Buckling optimization of Double-Double (DD) laminates with gradual thickness tapering

Comparative Study of Skin–Stringer Connection Approaches for Stiffened Structures with Curvilinear Stiffeners

Energy Element Method for Three-Dimensional Vibration Analysis of Stiffened Plates with Complex Geometries

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