Critical Buckling of Some Stiffened Panels in Compression, Shear and Bending

Abstract

SummaryPrevious papers by the authors and others have developed exact methods for computing the critical buckling loads of prismatic assemblies of rigidly interconnected thin flat rectangular plates. The plates may be isotropic or anisotropic and can carry uniform in-plane shear stresses and transverse stresses in addition to a longitudinal stress which varies linearly over the cross section but is longitudinally invariant. Published results obtained using these methods have only covered a few of the types of structure and loading which are of interest. This paper presents results which complement those already published. For instance, interaction curves are given for common types of panel in combined in-plane shear and longitudinal compression and bending. About half of these curves are nearly parabolic while some others differ greatly from the parabola, which errs on the safe side for all the results presented. Other results cover critical loads other than the lowest, panels with bulb flat stiffeners, as used for bridge decks, and the effects of assumptions usually made when idealising real panels before computation.