INNOVATIVE DESIGN OF STIFFENED PLATES AND COLUMNS, AN OVERVIEW

Abstract

Welded stiffened plates and shells are widely used in various structures, e.g. bridges, ships, bunkers, tank roofs, vehicles, etc. They are subject to various loadings: compression, shear, bending or combined load. The shape of the plates can be square, rectangular, circular, trapezoidal, etc. Plates and shells can be stiffened in one or in two directions with stiffeners of many different shapes. This study contains the minimum cost and weight design of different longitudinally stiffened plates. The deflections due to lateral pressure and compression stress are considered in the stress calculation and constraint. Furthermore, the local buckling constraint of the base plate strips is also formulated. The cost function as the objective function includes two kinds of steel and three kinds of welding technologies. The unknowns are the thickness of the base plate (tf) and the dimensions and the number of stiffeners (n).