STUDY ON ULTIMATE COMPRESSIVE STRENGTH PROPERTIES OF LONGITUDINALLY STIFFENED CONTINUOUS PLATES UNDER UNIAXIAL COMPRESSION.

This paper clarifies the ultimate strength properties of longitudinally stiffened continuous plates simply supported by transverse stiffeners with sufficient flexural rigidity under uniaxial compression. By means of the elasto-plastic finite displacement theory, in which much reduction of degree of freedom of analytical models and computer time can be greatly expected by introducing a technique similar to the usual modal analysis making use of generalized coordinates into the conventional finite element method, many models of stiffened plates with various values of parameters are efficiently analyzed. Moreover, the numerical results are compared with the strength curves specified by several design codes, and then the safety margin included in these design codes is discussed.