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General and local buckling of axially compressed grid-stiffened composite cylindrical shells

From:
Dan WANG and Mostafa ABDALLA (Delft University of Technology, 2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands), “Buckling analysis of grid-stiffened composite shells”, 11th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM XI) 5th European Conference on Computational Mechanics (ECCM V) 6th European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics (ECFD VI) E. Oñate, J. Oliver and A. Huerta (Eds)

ABSTRACT: There is a renewed interest in grid-stiffened composite structures; they are not only competitive with conventional stiffened constructions and sandwich shells in terms of weight but also enjoy superior damage tolerance properties. In this paper, both global and local struc- tural instabilities are investigated for grid-stiffened composite panels using homogenization the- ory. Characteristic cell configurations with periodic boundary constraints are employed for orthogrid- and isogrid-stiffened shells in order to smear the stiffened panel into an equivalen- t unstiffened shell. Homogenized properties corresponding to classical lamination theory are obtained by matching the strain energy of the stiffened and equivalent cells. Global buckling analysis is carried out based on the homogenized shell properties. Bloch wave theory is adopt- ed to calculate the local buckling load of grid-stiffened shells, where the interaction of adjacent cells is fully taken into account. Moreover, instead of considering skin buckling and stiffener crippling separately, as is commonly done, the skin and stiffeners are assembled together at the level of the characteristic cell. The critical instabilities can be captured whether they are related to the skin or stiffener or their interaction. The proposed combination of global/local models can also be used to predict the material failure of a structure. Numerical examples of orthogrid- and isogrid-stiffened isotropic panels show that the local buckling loads predicted by the proposed method match finite element calculations better than semi-analytical methods based on assumptions and idealisations. The proposed method is further validated using typical configurations of flat composite panels and circular composite cylinders.

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