A Method for Ultimate Strength Assessment of Plates in Combined Stresses

It is becoming a normal practice in structural engineering, including ships and offshore industry, to perform non-linear finite element analysis to assess the structure’s capacity for design or evaluation purposes. However, experience has shown that the quality and accuracy of the non-linear FE analysis results are highly dependent on the person’s skills and analysis procedures used. In some cases, the results could lead to a wrong conclusion. Simplified method with good accuracy is still a preferred approach in design by the industry because it is simple and easy to use. However, even the method for the simple model, a plate under combined loads, has not been addressed completely because of its complexity. This paper has thus developed a simple method for the ultimate strength analysis of square plates under combined longitudinal and transverse compressive stresses. The method is fully validated with a systematic non-linear FE analysis results. The paper has also compared the methods from the industry standards BS5400 and DIN18800. Analysis examples are also provided in the paper for reference and discussions.