Rigid-plastic modelling of blast-loaded stiffened plates—Part I: One-way stiffened plates

Abstract A new rigid-plastic analysis of stiffened plates subjected to uniformly distributed blast loads is developed. In this first part of a two-part paper, a uniform one-way stiffened plate with clamped ends is modelled as a singly symmetric beam, comprised of one stiffener and its tributary plating. Rigid-plastic analysis is then applied to this beam using an idealized piecewise linear bending moment-axial force capacity interaction relation or yield curve. Two solutions to the response are developed. The first solution is in closed form and is based on the solution of the resulting linearized differential equations. The second solution is obtained by approximating the response as a sequence of instantaneous mode responses, where the mode shapes are determined by an extremum principle which maximizes the rate of change of the kinetic energy. This latter solution may be extended to cases involving non-rigid boundaries and two-way stiffening and this is done in the second part of this paper. Here, the two solution methods are applied to several examples of one-way stiffened plates subjected to various blast-type pulses. Good agreement is obtained between the present results and those from elastic-plastic beam finite element and finite strip solutions.