Buckling behavior of strengthened perforated plates under shear loading

This paper is dedicated to the buckling behaviors of strengthened perforated plates under edge shear loading, which is a typical load pattern of steel plates in civil engineering, especially in plate and box girders. The square plates considered each has a centric circular hole and is simply supported on four edges in the out-of-plane direction. Three types of strengthening stiffeners named ringed stiffener (RS), flat stiffener (FSA and FSB) and strip stiffener (SSA, SSB and SSC) are mainly discussed. The finite element method (FEM) has been employed to analyse the elastic and elasto-plastic buckling behavior of unstrengthened and strengthened perforated plates. Results show that most of the strengthened perforated plates behave higher buckling strengths than the unstrengthened ones, while the enhancements in elastic buckling stress and elastoplastic ultimate strength are closely related to sti ffener types as well as plate geometric parameters including plate slenderness ratio and hole diameter to plate width ratio. The critical slenderness ratios of shear loaded strengthened perforated plates, which determine the practical buckling pattern (i.e., elastic or elasto-plastic buckling) of the plates, are also studied. Based on the contrastive analyses of strengthening efficiency considering the influence of stiffener consumption, the most efficient cutout-strengthening methods for shear loaded perforated square plates with different slenderness ratios and circular hole diameter to plate width ratios are preliminarily identified.