LOAD CARRYING CAPABILITY OF STRINGER STIFFENED CURVED COMPOSITEPANELS IN THE POSTBUCKLING REGION

摘要

Stringer stiffened panels or shells are often used as struc-turalelements. The load carrying capacity of this type ofstructures is not exhausted when local skin buckling oc-curs.Therefore, an accurate prediction of the postbuck-lingbehaviour is required. In this paper, the postbucklingbehaviour is investigated by a method that is based ona discretisation of the structure by strip elements. Thismethod is applied to curved composite panels and themain focus of the evaluation of the results is on the de-terminationof the effective width of the skin which isrequired to obtain an approximation of the global panelbuckling load by the computation of the buckling loadof the stringer together with the load carrying part of theskin. Next to a brief overviewof the underlying nonlineartheory, numerical examples for this procedure are givenincluding comparisons to finite element analyses.