Design of Inner Ribs with Unequal Stiffness for Deep-Sea Highly Pressure-Resistant Cylindrical Shells and Utilizing NSGA-2 for Lightweight Optimization

Abstract

For conducting scientific research at depths in the ocean, deep-sea probes are essential pieces of equipment. The cylindrical shell is the most sensible and rational packaging structure for these detectors. New technical challenges for enhancing the pressure resistance and lightweight design of the pressure-resistant cylindrical shell arise from the need to ensure that the detector packaging structure can withstand the immense water pressure at tens of thousands of meters in the underwater environment, while simultaneously reducing the detector packaging structure’s self-weight. This article examines the detection system’s deep-sea pressure-resistant cylindrical shell. To address the issue of the pressure-resistant shell’s insufficient ability to counteract the overall instability caused by the inability to form unstable half-waves in the radial direction when the ring rib pressure-resistant shell experiences it, a design method for the ribs inside the unequal-stiffness pressure-resistant cylindrical shell is suggested. The shell’s instability pressure increases by 9.65 MPa following the stiffness adjustment. Simultaneously, in order to attain even more lightweight optimization, the optimal inner rib section was obtained by applying the orthogonal topology optimization method, which also reduced the weight by 106.8 g and effectively improved the compression stability of the high-pressure cylindrical shell structure. Based on this, key optimization variables were found by performing sensitivity analysis on the cylindrical shell structure’s parameters. Then, with lightweighting as the primary objective, the high-pressure-resistant cylindrical shell’s optimal structural parameters were found using a multi-objective optimization process using the second-generation fast non-dominated genetic algorithm (NSGA-2). This resulted in a weight reduction of 1.2492 kg, or 17.26% of the original pressure-resistant shell. This has led to the development of a lightweight, highly pressure-resistant method for packaging marine exploration equipment structures.