On the Nonlinear Bending and Vibration of Stiffened Curved Surfaces

Abstract

A comprehensive bending and free vibration study of centrally stiffened, laminated composite, singly curved shell surfaces is presented here. The shallow shell is considered to have simply supported edges along all boundaries. The stiffeners are taken as single layered composite beams. A C0 continuous finite element code is adopted combining FSDT and small strain moderate rotations. Eight noded two dimensional elements are adopted to formulate the isoparametric code. Benchmark problems are solved to confirm accuracy of the proposed approach. The maximum non-dimensional deflections and fundamental frequencies are furnished for varying material properties, laminations, stacking sequences and eccentric positions of bi-axial stiffeners. The results indicate that symmetric stacking of angle-ply laminations (450/−450/−450/450) and eccentric at bottom stiffeners must be preferred in industrial applications so that the maximum rigidity can be obtained for a given cost of production. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.