Advanced Ultimate Strength Formulations for Ship Plating Under Combined Biaxial Compression/Tension, Edge Shear, and Lateral Pressure Loads

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to develop more advanced design formulations for the ultimate strength of ship plating than available at present. Plate ultimate strength subject to any combination of the following four load components—longitudinal compression/tension, transverse compression/tension, edge shear, and lateral pressure loads—is addressed. The developed formulations are designed to be more sophisticated than existing theoretically based simplified methods. The influence of post-weld initial imperfections in the form of initial deflections and residual stresses is taken into account. It has been previously recognized that a single ultimate strength interaction equation cannot successfully represent the ultimate limit state of long and/or wide plating under all possible combinations of load components involved. This is due to the fact that the collapse behavior of the long and/or wide plating depends primarily on the predominant load components, implying that more than one strength interaction formulations may be needed to more properly predict the plate ultimate limit state. In this regard, the present study derives three sets of ultimate strength formulations for the long and/or wide plating under the corresponding primary load by treating lateral pressure as a secondary dead load. The ultimate strength interaction formula under all of the load components involved is then derived by a relevant combination of the individual strength formulas. The validity of the proposed ultimate strength equations is studied by comparison with nonlinear finite-element analyses and other numerically based solutions.