A Study of the Behaviour of Folded Plate Structures

The paper is concerned with the design of plane, perforated shear walls, loaded in their plane by forces transverse to the axis of the wall. Attention is given to the reduction in wall flexural stiffness due to perforation, and to the stress distribution in the wall. The design data, presented in the form of charts, are based on analysis by the stiffness method in which the perforated wall is represented by wide columns connected by beams.

In this paper a general method is proposed for optimization by non-linear programming. The method is used to design, for minimum weight, a family of fixed base pitched roof frames for which the elastic deflexions are restricted by BS 449. The method is used to produce design charts which are presented in the paper and can be used directly for design purposes. They can be used to select optimum pitch for the frame and optimum sections of the members. A method is given to make use of the fact that a continuous set of sections is not available in the safe load tables. Using these charts the optimum pitch and sections are selected from the available discrete sections. The programming problem is extended to deal with several unknowns and an example of the design of a pin-jointed frame with three unknowns is given. K.I. Majid and D.W.C. Elliott In the design of structures, the current standard sp

Mr. E. C. Ruddock (Department of Architecture, University of Edinburgh): ‘I quibble at the title of Dr. Hilson’s article. Unless we are to return to the language of the early nineteenth century, when “mechanical philosophy” described a course in applied physics, there is no need to call his course “philosophy of structure”. I would prefer to say that it is directed to the understanding of structures.