Effective plating in elastic–plastic range of primary support members in double-skin ship structures

The main objective of this paper is to obtain the effective breadth of the flange plating of the primary support members in the double-skin ship structures in the limit state and an elastic–plastic range. A typical behavior of double-skin structures is qualitatively studied on the basis of nonlinear finite element (FE) analysis of a wide box-like beam. Quantitative evaluations of the breadth of the effective plating are obtained from the FE parametric study of the plates under an in-plane load. The distribution of normal stress in the cross section of a plate (beam flange) in the limit state is found to be close to uniform. The formulations for the effective plating breadth of double-skin structures in the elastic–plastic range are also presented.