Optimal designing of a ribbed cylindrical panel made of composite material

Abstract

The shallow open-profile cylindrical shell strengthened in the middle with a stiffener rib and made of orthotropic composite material are considered under internal normal load. A problem of determination of optimal geometrical and physical parameters of the construction that maximize its rigidity and strength for given overall shell dimensions and fixed weight equal to the weight of a shell of constant thickness is investigated. The stated optimization problem is reduced to a nonlinear programming problem, which is solved by the deformable polyhedron method in combination with the method of direct search and using the parallel computing package in the Wolfram Mathematic software application. Numerical examples are given on the basis of which it is shown that the optimal choice of the shell and the rib parameters can substantially increase both the rigidity and strength of the ribbed construction in comparison with the shell of constant thickness of equal weight.