Lateral Pressure Effects on the Ultimate Strength of Plates

During the operations of ships and offshore structures in the ocean environment, these structures are subjected to combined lateral pressure and in-plane stresses. However, in today’s ship design and analysis procedures, the effects of the lateral pressure on the ultimate strength of these structures are often ignored. Previous studies have indicated that the lateral pressure could have a noticeable influence on the ultimate load carrying capacity of stiffened panels when they are subjected to combined longitudinal and transverse stresses. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic numerical study to quantify the lateral pressure effects on the ultimate strength of plates. The sensitivity of the plate’s ultimate strength to lateral pressure is characterized as a function of the plate geometry, the pressure magnitude and the ratio of the in-plane stress components. The present numerical study is performed by using LR’s in-house nonlinear finite element program VAST and the newly development LR procedure for nonlinear structural mechanics analysis was followed. The results and findings from this study are detailed in this paper.