Simulation of a crack in stiffened plates via a meshless formulation and FSDT

A meshless formulation for fracture analysis of stiffened plates is introduced in this paper. Based on an improved meshless model of stiffened plates proposed by the authors, in which flat plate and ribs are combined by implementing the displacement compatibility conditions between them, a crack is introduced by the diffraction method. The expanded basis function and the weight function based on t(-1) distribution are employed. Inheriting the meshless advantages from the model, the ribs in our formulation can be set at any location on the flat plate, and the remeshing of the flat plate is naturally avoided when rib location changes. Some numerical examples are investigated by the proposed formulation and the commercial FEM software ANSYS, and the accuracy of the proposed formulation is verified. The effects of ribs on the displacement, stress and SIFs of the stiffened plates that have cracks are discussed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.