A New Stiffened Plate Element for the Analysis of Arbitrary Plates

Publisher Summary In spite of a large number of elements developed so far, most of them lack in generality and are found to be inadequate and inefficient in some way or other for analyzing plates of arbitrary geometrical configurations. The isoparametric element has been the most successful one among available elements because of its generality to model a curved boundary successfully. But the shear-locking problem inherent in the isoparametric element makes it unsuitable for analyzing thin plates of arbitrary shapes. In this chapter, a four-noded stiffened plate element is developed, which has advantages and elegance of an isoparametric element to model arbitrary shaped plates but without the disadvantage of shear-locking phenomena. The element developed for the analysis of stiffened plates has the same feature of accommodating the arbitrary shape of the plate geometry, and the stiffener modeling is done in a general manner. The stiffener is considered in such a way as to lie anywhere within the plate element and need not follow the nodal line. Further, the orientation of the stiffener is kept arbitrary, which makes the analysis more flexible and the mesh division independent of the location and orientation of the stiffener. The new element has been successfully used for the static, dynamic, and stability analyses of arbitrary bare and stiffened plates.