Geometric evaluation of steel plates subjected to uniform transverse load with rectangular or trapezoidal stiffeners by means constructal design method

Abstract

The present work applied the constructal design method associated with computational modelling by the finite element method to evaluate the mechanical deflection behaviour of stiffened rectangular steel plates submitted to uniform transverse loading. To do so, a rectangular reference plate without stiffeners was considered. A steel volume portion of this plate was converted into stiffeners through the ϕ parameter, which represents the ratio between the stiffeners volume and the total volume of the reference plate. By adopting ϕ = 0.3, ten stiffened plates were configured: five with rectangular stiffeners and five with trapezoidal stiffeners. By keeping constant the total steel volume, the influence of geometry and number of stiffeners were studied regarding the maximum plate deflection. The results indicated that the trapezoidal shape for the stiffeners could minimise the maximum deflection until around 30% if compared with the rectangular shape stiffeners.