In practice, the submarine's major internal equipment is mounted to welded plating foundations, but submarine designers have been looking at the recent French innovation whereby the major internal equipment is mounted to a large truss/cradle structure through point supports. The focus of this research investigates the effects of radial point supports on the stability behavior of cylindrical she...

The recently developed Spring Back Reflector has low stiffness in the deployed configuration. A general method of stiffening this type of reflector without changing its folding properties is presented. The stiffening is achieved by adding a conical skirt around the edge of the dish; this skirt snaps elastically when the dish is folded. The paper concludes that it is possible to design spring ba...

In the present work, an optimization method is proposed in order to produce innovative stiffening layouts for large stiffened cylindrical shell structures, as they appear aerospace industry. A component-based logic applied on a ground mesh of structural elements (shells and beams), which was inspired by techniques explicit topology solid (plane or tridimensional massive models). Geometric compo...

PANDA2, a computer program for the minimum-weight design of elastic perfect and imperfect stiffened cylindrical panels and shells under multiple sets of combined loads, is used to obtain optimum designs of uniformly axially compressed elastic internal T-ring and external T-stringer stiffened cylindrical shells with initial imperfections in the form of the general buckling mode. The optimum desi...

The stability analysis of sleeve stiffened pin-ended slender hollow columns of pipe or box section is performed in the present study. This is accomplished by using energy method, employing three terms in the assumed approximate deflection function. The lengthy and tedious algebraic manipulations involved in solving the relevant eigenvalue problem, necessitates employing the "MATHEMATICA" softwa...

The in-plane compressive behaviour of thin-skin stiffened composite panels with a stress concentrator in the form of an open hole or low velocity impact damage is examined analytically. A fracture mechanics model, developed initially to predict notched compressive strength, was applied to estimate the compression-after-impact strength of a stiffened panel; in the analysis the impact damage is r...