Optimum Design of Reinforced Cylindrical Shells Under Combined Axial Compression and Internal Pressure

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of the random search method for the optimal design of single-layered rib-reinforced cylindrical shells under combined axial compression and internal pressure with account taken of the elastic-plastic material behavior. The optimality criterion is the minimum shell volume. The search area for the optimal solution in the space of the parameters being optimized is limited by the strength and stability conditions of the shell. When assessing stability, the discrete rib arrangement is taken into account. In addition to the strength and stability conditions of the shell, the feasible space is subjected to the imposition of constraints on the geometric dimensions of the structural elements being optimized. The difficulty in formulating a mathematical programming problem is that the critical stresses arising in optimally-compressed rib-reinforced cylindrical shells are a function of not only the skin and reinforcement parameters, but also the number of half-waves in the circumferential and meridional directions that are formed due to buckling. In turn, the number of these half-waves depends on the variable shell parameters. Consequently, the search area becomes non-stationary, and when formulating a mathematical programming problem, it is necessary to provide for the need to minimize the critical stress function with respect to the integer wave formation parameters at each search procedure step. In this regard, a method is proposed for solving the problem of optimally designing rib-reinforced shells, using a random search algorithm whose learning is carried out not only depending on the objective function increment, but also on the increment of critical stresses at each extremum search step. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a technique for optimizing this kind of shells, in which a special search-system learning algorithm is used, which consists in the fact that two problems of mathematical programming are simultaneously solved: that of minimizing the weight objective function and that of minimizing the critical stresses of shell buckling. The proposed technique is illustrated with a numerical example.