Responses of stiffened plates with varying depth of stiffeners under uniform lateral loads

The main portion of ship’s structure is usually composed of stiffened plates. Under various loads
applied to a ship, such as those due to cargo, buoyancy and waves, these stiffened plates are
subjected to combined in plane and lateral loads. Longitudinal stiffeners attached to the plates
may significantly increase the overall buckling loads of the resultant stiffened structures. In this
work, eigen-buckling responses for a series of rectangular perfectly flat plates and longitudinally
stiffened plates subjected to in plane axial forces for different depth of stiffeners are derived by
finite element approach using general purpose software (ANSYS). Finally stiffener arrangements
are explained in explicit form based on the results of numerical investigations of the non-linear
behaviour of plates and stiffened plates.