Ultimate Strength of Transverse Plate Assemblies Under Uniaxial Loads

Abstract

This paper deals with the strength of panels composed of three and five plates connected transversely and loaded along the longitudinal direction. First, a comparison between the strength of panels having asymmetric imperfections and of single plates is made, which allows evaluating the ability of the single plate to properly simulate the panel strength. Following this, the results obtained for a panel model having symmetric imperfections are confronted with the results of the asymmetric imperfections. The asymmetrical and symmetrical models of the panel give respectively the lowest and highest strengths possible (imperfections in adjacent plates with different amplitudes have “in between” strengths) allowing to establish limits to the variation of the strength. The results show that using a single plate can be conservative or nonconservative, depending of the plate slenderness and shape of initial deflections. It is concluded that for design purposes it will in general be enough to consider assemblies of three plates, as the results for five plate assemblies are not much different.

Influence of Model Geometry and Boundary Conditions on the Ultimate Strength of Stiffened Panels Under Uniaxial Compressive Loading

“…The behavior of plates subjected to buckling loads depends, to a considerable degree, on the shape of their initial deflections [11]. An equivalent initial imperfection ofthe stiffened panels is used in the present paper and is assumed as follows [12]: The slendemess parameter of the plate is defined as (5) where ffy ^nd E are the yield stress and Young's modulus, respectively.…”

“…The use of three-bay panels instead of one single-bay panel allows us to obtain more realistic results by avoiding boundary condition problems for the central plates related to the eccentricity of the load and to include the interference between adjacent panels, which was found to be significant by Luis et al [4,5]. Xu and Guedes Soares [6,7] investigated the effects of different models, including 3 spans, 1/2 + 1-1-1/2 spans, 1 +1 spans, and 1 span with clamped and simply supported boundary condition on the ultimate strength under uniaxial compressive loading, which was used to study for the setting of their experiment.…”