• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.335-348
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• 2010

Cutouts are often provided in structural and aircraft components for ventilation, for access, inspection, electric lines and fuel lines or sometimes to lighten the structure. This paper addresses the effects of cutout shape (i.e., circular, square, diamond, elliptical-vertical and elliptical-horizontal) and size on buckling and postbuckling response of quasi-isotropic (i.e., $(+45/-45/0/90)_{2s}$) composite laminate under uni-axial compression. The finite element method is used to carry out the investigation. The formulation is based on first order shear deformation theory and von Karman's assumptions are used to incorporate geometric nonlinearity. The 3-D Tsai-Hill criterion is used to predict the failure of a lamina while the onset of delamination is predicted by the interlaminar failure criterion. It is observed that for the smaller size cutout area there is no significant effect of cutout shape on load-deflection response of the laminate. It is also concluded that the cutout size has substantial influence on the buckling and postbuckling response of the laminate with elliptical-horizontal cutout, while this effect is observed to be the least in case of laminate with elliptical-vertical cutout.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.808-813
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• 2004

The stress analysis on orthotropic composite cylindrical shells with one circular or one elliptical cutout subjected to an axial force is carried out by using an analytical and experimental method. The composite cylindrical shell governing equation of the Donnell's type is applied to this study and all results are presented by the stress concentration factor. The stress concentration factor is defined as the ratio of the stress on the region around a cutout to the nominal stress of the shell. The stress concentration factor is classified into the circumferential stress concentration factors and the radial stress concentration factors due to the cylindrical coordinate of which the origin is the center of a cutout. The considered loading condition is only axial tension loading condition. In this study, thus, the maximum stress is induced on perpendicular region against axial direction, on the coordinate. Various cutout sizes are expressed using the radius ratio, (equation omitted), which is the radius of a cutout over one of the cylindrical shell. Experimental results are obtained using strain gages, which are attached around a cutout of the cylindrical shell. As the result from this study, the stress concentration around a cutout can be predicted by using the analytical method for an orthotropic composite cylindrical shell having a circular or an elliptical cutout.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.29 no.1
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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.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.427-446
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• 2022

Cutouts in the beams or plates are often unavoidable due to inspection, maintenance, ventilation, structural aesthetics purpose, and sometimes to lighten the structures. Therefore, there will be a substantial reduction in the strength of the structure due to the introduction of the cutouts. However, these cutouts can be reinforced with the different patterns of ribs (stiffener) to enhance the strength of the structure. The present study highlights the influence of the elliptical cutout reinforced with a different pattern of ribs on the stability performance of such stiffened composite panels subjected to non-uniform edge loads by employing the Finite element (FE) technique. In the present formulation, a 9-noded heterosis element is used to model the skin, and a 3-noded isoparametric beam element is used to simulate the rib that is attached around a cutout in different patterns. The displacement compatibility condition is employed between the plate and stiffener, and arbitrary orientations are taken care by introducing respective transformation matrices. The effect of shear deformation and rotary inertia are incorporated in the formulation. A new mesh configuration is developed to house the attached ribs around an elliptical cutout with different patterns. Initially, a study is performed on the panels with different stiffener schemes for various ply orientations and for different stiffener depth to width ratios (d_s/b_s) to determine an optimal stiffener configuration. Further, various parametric studies are conducted on an obtained optimal stiffened panel to understand the effect of cutout size, cutout orientation, panel aspect ratio, and boundary conditions. Finally, from the analysis, it can be observed that the arrangement of the stiffener attached to a panel has a major impact on the buckling capacity of the stiffened panel. The stiffener's depth to width ratio also significantly influences the buckling characteristic.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society For Composite Materials Conference
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• 1999.11a
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• pp.211-214
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• 1999

The stress distribution around the cutout of composite cylindrical shells with a circular or elliptical reinforced cutout subjected to axial compression or tension is studied by asymptotic method. Analytical solutions used a Donnell type orthotropic shell theory are presented by the defined stress concentration factor and are compared to experimental results. The experiment used the universal testing machine (UTM), strain gage and fixtures designed/manufactured for axial tension test of a cylindrical shell is carried and the composite material used in the experiment is plain weave glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP).

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.60 no.5
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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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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.815-827
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• 2014

Buckling optimization of laminated composite plates is significant as they fail because of buckling under in-plane compressive loading. The plate is usually modeled without cutout so that the buckling strength is found analytically using classical laminate plate theory (CLPT). However in real world applications, the composite plates are modeled with cutouts for getting them assembled and to offer the provisions like windows, doors and control system. Finite element analysis (FEA) is used to analyze the buckling strength of the plate with cutouts and it leads to high computational cost when the plate is optimized. In this article, a genetic algorithm based optimization technique is used to optimize the composite plate with cutout. The computational time is highly reduced by replacing FEA with artificial neural network (ANN). The effectiveness of the proposed method is explored with two numerical examples.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.130-136
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• 2003

A FQI(fatigue quality index) analysis using the concept of SF(severity factor) is performed to various shape of elliptical hole. FQI is fatigue quality index to estimate the dynamic SF from static SF by finite element analysis. Since the SF is affected by the location of cutout in plate and radius ratio, static SF is analyzed with finite element method and forms the equation of FQI for predicting a dynamic SF. To examine the validity, dynamic SF is measured by photoelastics and thermalelastics for an epoxy resin plate with various elliptical holes under dynamic load.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.227-239
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• 2020

The aim of this study is to obtain the nonlinear and post-buckling responses of relatively thick functionally graded plates with oblique elliptical cutouts using a new semi-analytical approach. To model the oblique elliptical hole in a FGM plate, six plate-elements are used and the connection between these elements is provided by the well-known Penalty method. Therefore, the semi-analytical technique used in this paper is known as the plate assembly technique. In order to take into account for functionality of the material in a perforated plate, the volume fraction of the material constituents follows a simple power law distribution. Since the FGM perforated plates are relatively thick in this research, the structural model is assumed to be the first order shear deformation theory and Von-Karman's assumptions are used to incorporate geometric nonlinearity. The equilibrium equations for FGM plates containing elliptical holes are obtained by the principle of minimum of total potential energy. The obtained nonlinear equilibrium equations are solved numerically using the quadratic extrapolation technique. Various sets of boundary conditions for FGM plates and different cutout sizes and orientations are assumed here and their effects on nonlinear response of plates under compressive loads are examined.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.85 no.2
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• pp.147-161
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• 2023

Based on the ideas of variational differential quadrature (VDQ) and finite element method (FEM), a numerical approach named as VDQFEM is applied herein to study the large deformations of plate-type structures under static loading with arbitrary shape hole made of functionally graded graphene platelet-reinforced composite (FG-GPLRC) in the context of higher-order shear deformation theory (HSDT). The material properties of composite are approximated based upon the modified Halpin-Tsai model and rule of mixture. Furthermore, various FG distribution patterns are considered along the thickness direction of plate for GPLs. Using novel vector/matrix relations, the governing equations are derived through a variational approach. The matricized formulation can be efficiently employed in the coding process of numerical methods. In VDQFEM, the space domain of structure is first transformed into a number of finite elements. Then, the VDQ discretization technique is implemented within each element. As the last step, the assemblage procedure is performed to derive the set of governing equations which is solved via the pseudo arc-length continuation algorithm. Also, since HSDT is used herein, the mixed formulation approach is proposed to accommodate the continuity of first-order derivatives on the common boundaries of elements. Rectangular and circular plates under various boundary conditions with circular/rectangular/elliptical cutout are selected to generate the numerical results. In the numerical examples, the effects of geometrical properties and reinforcement with GPL on the nonlinear maximum deflection-transverse load amplitude curve are studied.