Strength of ship plates under combined loading

Strength of ship plates 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 unstiffened plates. The majority of these investigations deal with plates subjected to longitudinal compression only. For real ship structural plating, the most general loading case is a combination of longitudinal stress, transverse stress, shear stress and lateral pressure. In this paper, a simplified method is generalized to deal with such combined load cases. The obtained results indicate that the simplified method is able to determine the ultimate strength of unstiffened plates with imperfections in the form of welding induced residual stresses and geometric deflections subjected to combined loads. Comparisons with experimental results show that the procedure has sufficient accuracy for practical applications in design.