In a shell structure, the discontinuity at the intersection of two she
lls causes stress concentration. This paper presents a procedure which
couples the Curvature Function Method with the FAST1 structural shell
analysis program to find a fully stressed thickness profile which kee
ps the stress at the discontinuities at the nominal stress value. The
Curvature Function Method is a zero-order method that requires only st
ress values along the shell, not gradients of the stresses with respec
t to the design variables, and the resulting thickness profile has C2
continuity. Although the method is independent of the structural analy
sis program used to determine stress values, Fast1 provides a particul
ar advantage because it allows the user to model complex shells with o
nly a few large shell elements and still retain a sufficiently accurat
e solution. Thus both preparation and computation times are reduced su
bstantially. Convergence of different initial designs to one final des
ign using this procedure is demonstrated for a cylinder-cone intersect
ion problem. This procedure is also applied to two other shell models
with multiple discontinuities to find their fully stressed thickness p
rofiles. The procedure presented in this paper provides a practical te
chnique and tool to aid the design engineer, although the fully stress
ed design may not be the theoretically optimal design of minimum weigh
t.