Strength of ship stiffened panels under combined loading

A ship's hull is a box girder structure composed of stiffened panels and therefore, strength of stiffened panels plays a significant role for the ultimate strength analysis of ship structures. In recent years several authors have proposed simplified methods to calculate the ultimate strength of stiffened panels. However, the majority of these investigations deal with stiffened panels subjected to longitudinal compression only. For real ship structural stiffened panels, the most general loading case is the combination of longitudinal stresses, transverse stresses, shear stresses and lateral pressure with the first component dominant. In this paper, a simplified method is generalized to deal with the combined loading. The results obtained indicated that the simplified method is able to address the effects of various factors including combined loading affecting the ultimate strength of stiffened panels.