Ultimate resistance of longitudinally stiffened curved plates subjected to pure compression

Abstract

Design guidelines are proposed for the calculation of the ultimate resistance of longitudinally stiffened, transversally curved plates subjected to uniform compression. They represent internal plated members of box-girders. The proposed method is in accordance with the Eurocode formalism and follows the effective width concept from EN 1993-1-5. The latter strongly underestimates the resistance of stiffened, curved plates. Therefore, the new method extends the scope of the current European standards from flat to curved plates. A general form of the buckling coefficient is derived for orthotropic shell buckling, which is consistent with the solution for orthotropic buckling of plates according to Annex A, EN 1993-1-5. The method presented combines the new equation with the existing design proposals for unstiffened curved panels from the literature and the current design rules for flat plated structures according to EN 1993-1-5. The method is compared with numerical results on simply supported, cylindrically curved panels stiffened with trapezoidal longitudinal stiffeners, where the longitudinal edges are unconstrained and loaded edges are constrained, and a good correlation is achieved.