Free vibration and buckling response of hat-stiffened composite panels under general loading

The paper presents finite element free vibration and buckling analysis of laminated hat-stiffened shallow and deep shells using arbitrarily oriented stiffener formulation. Modified approach for modelling the curved stiffener is implemented using necessary transformations. A simplified stiffener formulation is presented to accommodate various shapes of stiffener shapes in developing the rigidity matrix for the finite element formulation. Investigation has been carried out on free vibration and buckling analyses of laminated composite stiffened shell structures with laminated open section (rectangular or ‘T’ shaped) and closed section (‘hat’ shaped) stiffeners. Parametric study on the hat-stiffened panels for the free vibration and buckling analyses confirms that the closed section stiffener being torsionally rigid is found to show better performance over open section stiffeners.