Shear Strength of Plate Girders in Ship Structures

Analysis of 5 transversely stiffened and 12 longitudinally stiffened plate girder panels and 3 box girder web panels using ABAQUS [1] software package is conducted to validate the FEM for prediction of ultimate shear capacity of plate and box girders. Good agreement between ultimate strength obtained by calculations and experiments was achieved. Because the existing design procedure does not allow to account for the influence of the post critical behaviour of webs for ships, the results obtained by the application of JTP approach [2] have been demonstrated to be extremely conservative. The applicability of EC3-1-5 [3] to assess the shear capacity of plate girders in ship structures was investigated. The design procedure of EC3-1-5 by neglecting the contribution from the flanges has been proposed for design of plate girders in ship structures.Copyright © 2009 by ASME