Buckling and post-buckling behavior of titanium alloy stiffened panels under shear load

Titanium alloy has been increasingly applied in aviation industry due to its superior performance. However, the titanium alloy structures are less studied. This work investigates the structural behavior of Ti6Al4V titanium alloy stiffened panels under in-plane shear load by experiments and numerical analysis. After the shear tests, the buckling instability, the post-buckling process and the failure mechanism of the specimen were obtained. The Finite Element(FE) models were established with the subsequent validation verification. A parametric analysis was implemented to study the influence of stringer thickness and stringer height on the behavior of the stiffened panels. The results show that after the initial local buckling on the skin, the buckling mode jumps several times with the increase of load. The stringers twist when the load reaches a certain level, and finally the structure damages due to the plastic deformation and the global buckling. The shear clip has little effect on the buckling and failure loads. Compared to the relatively large effect on the buckling load, the influence of the stringer thickness and stringer height on the failure load is neglectable.According to the parametric analysis, the stringer thickness influences the final buckling mode and failure mode, while the stringer height affects the buckling mode transformation.