Buckling and free vibration analyses of stiffened plates using the FSDT mesh-free method

This paper presents a mesh-free Galerkin method for the free vibration and stability analyses of stiffened plates via the first-order shear deformable theory (FSDT). The model of a stiffened plate is formed by (1) regarding the plate and the stiffener separately, (2) imposing displacement compatible conditions between the plate and the stiffener so that displacement fields of the stiffener can be expressed in terms of the mid-surface displacement of the plate, and (3) superimposing the strain energy of plate and stiffener. Because there are no meshes used in this method, the stiffeners can be placed anywhere on the plate and need not be placed along the mesh lines. Several numerical examples are computed by this method to show its accuracy and convergence. The present results demonstrate good agreement with the existing solutions given by other researchers and the ANSYS. Influences of support size and order of the complete basis functions on the numerical accuracy are also investigated. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.