Stressed skin

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Stressed skin" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In mechanical engineering, stressed skin is a rigid construction in which the skin or covering takes a portion of the structural load, intermediate between monocoque, in which the skin assumes all or most of the load, and a rigid frame, which has a non-loaded covering. Typically, the main frame has a rectangular structure and is triangulated by the covering; a stressed skin structure has localized compression-taking elements (rectangular frame) and distributed tension-taking elements (skin).