Simplified mechanical model of stiffened panel structures based on laminate smeared stiffener method

Abstract

Compared to flat panels, stiffened panels have a greater number of components and significant dimensional variations in different directions of these components. This often results in excessive mesh quantities and poor mesh quality during finite element analysis. Based on the relationship between deformation and generalized forces on the unit cells of the stiffened panel and laminated panel, this study has derived a simplified calculation method specifically for stiffened panels. The method transforms the stiffened panel into an equivalent three-layered orthogonal anisotropic laminated panel by adjusting the elastic and shear moduli of each layer of the laminated panel, significantly simplifying the model and improving computational efficiency. The equivalent laminated panel model can reproduce the tensile, compressive, shear, bending, and torsional deformations of the stiffened panel structure and can be used to calculate the deformation and buckling capacity of the original stiffened panel structure. This paper also provides static and buckling examples to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. In the static example, the maximum relative error of the deformation values calculated by the proposed method is 3.244 %. The average relative error of the first six orders of buckling loads in buckling Example 1 is 5.244 %. In comparison with the conventional method, the computation time of buckling Examples 1 and 2 is reduced by 22 % and 87 %, respectively.