21st International Research/Expert Conference
Plate members are widely used in modern lightweight construction. In order to reduce the mass of these structures, while preserving an adequate stiffness at the same time, the thickness of the plate should be as small as possible and the stability is gained by introducing stiffeners. Depending on their rigidity, there are two possible buckling modes for the plate. For flexible stiffeners, the resulting mode is a global one in which the stiffeners bend with the plate. Beyond a particular value of their stiffness, the critical stress of the plate remains constant and the resulting mode is a local buckling mode of the sub-panels of the plate. The goal is to find the cross-section dimensions of stiffeners beyond which the increase in stiffness will no longer affect the value of the critical buckling stress. This paper presents a procedure to get optimized cross-section dimensions for longitudinally stiffened plates under compression with two flat stiffeners. The cross-section is optimized using MATLA algorithms according to the buckling plate theory. The finite element models are used to confirm the optimization process.