EFFICIENT MULTILEVEL SUBSTRUCTURING WITH CONSTRAINTS FOR BUCKLING ANDVIBRATION ANALYSIS OF PRISMATIC PLATE ASSEMBLIES

The use of substructuring in the buckling and vibration analysis of la rge structures permits very substantial improvements in computational efficiency. The exact multi-level substructuring capability of the wid ely used computer program VICONOPT for the analysis and optimum design of prismatic plate assemblies has been extended by the inclusion of n ew theory, presented in this paper, which permits constraints on any o f the internal or external nodes of substructures. The computational s avings by using substructuring in this way are shown to be typically 5 0-70% compared with previous VICONOPT solutions. The theory is applica ble to any method or computer code for structures whose buckling or vi bration modes combine responses of different half-wavelengths, with VI CONOPT being used as an example. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All ri ghts reserved.