Design and optimization of improving stability of curvilinear blade-stiffened panels

Stiffened panels are widely used in the aerospace field as a typical structure. To further expand the design space of straight stiffened panels, an optimization framework for curvilinear blade-stiffened panels was developed based on ModelCenter optimization environment, Catia and Abaqus. Stiffeners were generated by equally-split cubic B-spline interpolation function, which had no limit to the number of parameters, thus providing a sufficiently large optimization space for curvilinear stiffened panels. On the other hand, two methods were taken to load on stiffeners including collecting loaded edges of stiffeners and making stiffeners perpendicular to panel edges and some new configurations of stiffened panels were proposed. Optimization results show that for single-axle load, curvilinear stiffened panels in comparison with straight stiffened panels make very small stability improvement. But for multi-axial load, curvilinear stiffened panels have better stability than straight stiffened panels.