• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제60권5호
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• pp.795-807
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• 2016

This study tries to examine the effect of different parameters on stress analysis of infinite plates with central quasi-triangular cutout using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and also an attempt has been made to introduce general optimum parameters in order to achieve the minimum amount of stress concentration around this type of cutout on isotropic and orthotropic plates. Basis of the presented method is expansion of analytical method conducted by Lekhnitskii for circular and elliptical cutouts. Design variables in this study include fiber angle, load angle, curvature radius of the corner of the cutout, rotation angle of the cutout and at last material of the plate. Also, diagrams of convergence and duration time of the desired problem are compared with Simulated Annealing algorithm. Conducted comparison is indicative of appropriateness of this method in optimization of the plates. Finite element numerical solution is employed to examine the results of present analytical solution. Overlap of the results of the two methods confirms the validity of the presented solution. Results show that by selecting the aforementioned parameters properly, less amounts of stress can be achieved around the cutout leading to an increase in load-bearing capacity of the structure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제77권2호
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• pp.245-259
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• 2021

In this research, the influence of the laminate stacking sequence on thermal stress distribution in symmetric composite plates with a quasi-square cutout subjected to uniform heat flux is examined analytically using the complex variable technique. The analytical solution is obtained based on the thermo-elastic theory and the Lekhnitskii's method. Furthermore, by employing a suitable mapping function, the solution of symmetric laminates containing a circular cutout is extended to the quasi-square cutout. The effect of important parameters including the stacking sequence of laminates, the angular position, the bluntness, the aspect ratio of cutout, the flux angle and the composite material are examined on the thermal stress distribution. It is found out that the circular shape for cutout may not necessarily be the optimum geometry for all stacking sequences. The finite element analysis results are used to validate the analytical solution.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제28권3호
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• pp.319-329
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• 2018

The field around additional cutout of the floor beam web in orthotropic bridge deck was subjected to high stress concentration, especially the weld toe between floor beam and U shaped rib and the free edge of the additional cutout. Based on different considerations, different geometrical parameters of additional cutout were proposed in European, American and Japanese specifications, and there remained remarkable differences among them. In this study, considering influence of out-of-plane deformation of floor beam web and U shaped rib, parameter analysis for additional cutout under typical load cases was performed by fine finite element method. The influence of additional cutout shape and height to the stress distribution around the additional cutout were investigated and analyzed. Meanwhile, the static and fatigue test on this structure details was carried out. The stress distribution was consistent with the finite element analysis results. The fatigue property for additional cutout height of 95mm was slightly better than that of 61.5 mm.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.39-51
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• 2018

Position of a circular or elliptical cutout within an orthotropic plate has great influence on its buckling behavior. This paper aims at finding the optimal position (both location and orientation) of a single circular/elliptical cutout, within an orthotropic rectangular plate, that maximizes the critical buckling load. We consider linear buckling of simply supported orthotropic plates under uniaxial edge loads. To obtain the optimal positions of the cutouts, we have employed a MATLAB optimization routine coupled with buckling computation in ANSYS. Our results show that the position of the cutout that maximizes the buckling load has great dependence on the material properties, laminate configurations, and the geometrical parameters of the plate. These optimal results, for a number of plate geometries and cutout sizes, are reported in this paper. These results will be useful in the design of perforated orthotropic plates against buckling failure.

• International Journal of Ocean System Engineering
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• 제1권2호
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• pp.95-101
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• 2011

Perforated plates with cutouts (or holes) are widely used in structural members. These cutouts provide stress concentration in plates. Extensive studies have been carried out on stress concentration in perforated plates, which consider cutout shapes, boundary conditions, bluntness of cutouts, and more. This study presents stress concentration analyses of perforated plates with not only various cutouts and bluntness but also different cutout orientations. Especially, the effect of cutout orientation on stress concentration is emphasized since structural members have become more complicated recently. To obtain stress concentration patterns, a finite element program, ANSYS, is used. For the designated goal, three parameters are considered as follows: the shapes of polygonal cutouts (circle, triangle, and square), bluntness (a counter measure of radius ratio, r/R), and rotation of cutouts (${\theta}$). From the analyses, it is shown that, in general, as bluntness increases, the stress concentration increases, regardless of the shape and rotation. A more important finding is that the stress concentration increases as the cutouts become more oriented from the baseline, which is the positive horizontal axis (+x). This fact demonstrates that the orientation is also a relatively significant design factor to reduce stress concentration. In detail, in the case of the triangle cutout, orienting one side of the triangle cutout to be perpendicular to the applied tensile forces is preferable. Similarly, in the case of the square cutout, it is more advantageous to orient two sides of square cutout to be perpendicular to the applied tensile force. Therefore, at the design stage, determining the direction of a major tensile force is required. Then, by aligning those polygon cutouts properly, we can reduce stress concentration.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제61권2호
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• pp.255-266
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• 2017

In this study, self-supporting roofing elements especially convenient for large-span structures such as stadium, airport terminal, mall, coliseum, etc. were examined with respect to critical buckling load. These elements were assumed as laminated composite plates and, variation of free-edge forms, cutout types and lamination configurations were used as design parameters. Based on the architectural feature and structural requirements, the effects of curvilinear free-edge form on critical buckling load were focused on in this research. Within this scope, 14 types of lamination configuration were specified according to various orientation angle, number and thickness of plies with a constant value of total plate thickness. Besides that, 6 different types of cutout and 3 different free-edge forms were determined. By combining all these parameters 294 different critical buckling load analyses were performed by using ANSYS Mechanical software based on finite element method. Effects of those parameters on critical buckling load were evaluated referring to the obtained results. According to the results presented here, it may be concluded that lamination conditions have more significant influence on the critical buckling load values than the other parameters. On the other hand, it is perceived that curvilinear free-edge forms explicitly undergo changings depending on lamination conditions. For future work, existence of delamination might be considered and progression of the defect could be investigated by using non-linear analysis.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제5권5호
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• pp.609-624
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• 1997

The optimization of cutouts in composite plates was investigated by implementing a procedure known as Evolutionary Structural Optimization. Perforations were introduced into a finite element mesh of the plate from which one or more cutouts of a predetermined size were evolved. In the examples presented, plates were rejected from around each evolving cutout based on a predefined rejection criterion. The limiting ply within each plate element around the cutout was determined based on the Tsai-Hill failure criterion. Finite element plates with values below the product of the average Tsai-Hill number and a rejection criterion were subsequently removed. This process was iterated until a steady state was reached and the rejection criterion was then incremented by an evolutionary rate and the above steps repeated until the desired cutout area was achieved. Various plates with differing lay-up and loading parameters were investigated to demonstrate the generality and robustness of this optimization procedure.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제29권4호
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• pp.557-567
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• 2018

Cylindrical shell structures buckle at service loads which are much lower than their associated theoretical buckling loads. The main source of this discrepancy is the presence of various imperfections which are created on the cylinder body during different processes as manufacturing, handling, assembling and machining. Many cylindrical shell structures are still designed against buckling based on the experimental data introduced by NASA SP-8007 as conservative lower bound curves. This study employed the numerical based Linear Buckling mode shape Imperfection (LBMI) method and modified it using a stochastic method to assess the effect of geometrical imperfections in more details on the buckling of cylindrical shells with and without the cutout. The comparison of results with those obtained from the numerical Simcple Perturbation Load Imperfection (SPLI) method for cylinders with and without cutout revealed a good correlation. The effect of two parameters of size and number of cutouts on the buckling load was investigated using the linear buckling and Modified LBMI methods. Results confirmed that in cylinders with a small cutout inserting geometrical imperfection using either SPLI or modified LBMI methods significantly reduced the value of the predicted buckling load. However, in cylinders with larger cutouts, the effect of the cutout is dominant, thus considering geometrical imperfection had a minor effect on the buckling loads predicted by both SPLI and modified LBMI methods. Furthermore, the modified LBMI method was employed to evaluate the combination effect of cutout numbers and size on the buckling load. It is shown that in small cutouts, an increasing in the cutout size up to a certain value resulted in a remarkable reduction of the buckling load, and beyond that limit, the buckling loads were constant against D/R ratios. In addition, the cutout number shows a more significant effect on decreasing the buckling load at small D/R ratios than large D/R ratios.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제43권6호
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• pp.707-723
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• 2022

This article aims to investigate the size dependent bending behavior of perforated nanobeams incorporating the nonlocal and the microstructure effects based on the nonlocal strain gradient elasticity theory (NSGET). Shear deformation effect due to cutout process is studied by using Timoshenko beams theory. Closed formulas for the equivalent geometrical characteristics of regularly squared cutout shape are derived. The governing equations of motion considering the nonlocal and microstructure effects are derived in comprehensive procedure and nonclassical boundary conditions are presented. Analytical solution for the governing equations of motion is derived. The derived non-classical analytical solutions are verified by comparing the obtained results with the available results in the literature and good agreement is observed. Numerical results are obtained and discussed. Parametric studies are conducted to explore effects of perforation characteristics, the nonclassical material parameters, beam slenderness ratio as well as the boundary and loading conditions on the non-classical transverse bending behavior of cutout nanobeams. Results obtained are supportive for the design, analysis and manufacturing of such nanosized structural system.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제33권5호
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• pp.717-727
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• 2019

This paper is motivated by the lack of studies in the technical literature concerning to vibration analysis of a single-layered graphene sheet (SLGS) with corner cutout based on the nonlocal elasticity model framework of classical Kirchhoff thin plate. An isogeometric analysis (IGA) based upon non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) is employed for approximation of the L-shape SLGS deflection field. Trimming technique is employed to create the cutout in geometry of L-shape plate. The L-shape plate is assumed to be Free (F) in the straight edges of cutout while any arbitrary boundary conditions are applied to the other four straight edges including Simply supported (S), Clamped (C) and Free (F). The Numerical studies are carried out to express the influences of the nonlocal parameter, cutout dimensions, boundary conditions and mode numbers on the variations of the natural frequencies of SLGS. It is precisely shown that these parameters have considerable effects on the free vibration behavior of the system. In addition, numerical results are validated and compared with those achieved using other analysis, where an excellent agreement is found. The effectiveness and the accuracy of the present IGA approach have been demonstrated and it is shown that the IGA is efficient, robust and accurate in terms of nanoplate problems. This study serves as a benchmark for assessing the validity of numerical methods used to analyze the single-layered graphene sheet with corner cutout.