An Empirical Formulation for Predicting the Ultimate Compressive Strength of Plates and Stiffened Plates

The aim of this study is to derive an empirical formula for predicting ultimate strength of plates and stiffened plates subjected to uniaxial compression. The test data of ultimate compressive strength for unstiffened and stiffened plates previously obtained by others have been collected. Many test data are necessary so that the derived formula will be available in wide range of plate dimensions. Additional collapse tests for a plate specimen with one flat bar stiffener, varying dimensions of plate and stiffener were performed in this study. On the basis of the present and previous experimental data, a more useful empirical formula than the existing ones was derived by applying the least square method.