Imperfection-insensitive design of stiffened conical shells based on equivalent multiple perturbation load approach

Stiffened conical shells in launch vehicles are very sensitive to various forms of imperfections. As a type of equivalent imperfections, several perturbation load approaches are used to investigate the influence of dimple-shape imperfections on the load-carrying capacity of stiffened conical shells. Firstly, the effect of axial location of dimple is examined by single perturbation load approach (SPLA), since the stiffness of stiffened conical shells varies along axial direction. Then, worst multiple perturbation load approach (WMPLA) is employed to find the lower bound of the collapse load of stiffened conical shells, and also provides the knowledge to determine the number of dimples in the multiple perturbation load approach (MPLA). After that, the optimization of stiffened conical shells for imperfection-insensitive design is carried out, where the equivalent MPLA is adopted during the optimization process to reduce the computational cost. Illustrative example indicates that stiffened conical shells exhibit more complicated imperfection sensitivity compared to cylindrical shells, and the proposed optimization framework can find an imperfection-insensitive design under structural weight constraint in an efficient manner. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.