| Abstract: | A stiffened plate is one of the principal structural components of the hull. During the design phase it is useful to study this structure considering it as a system consisting of monodimensional elements. Therefore, it is appropriate to identify the plate breadth that collaborates with the stiffener in the simplified calculation.The aim of this work is to investigate the effective breadth, regarding both stiffness and strength. The analysis is performed comparing various numerical solutions supplied by a finite-element program with solutions based on the beam theory. Analytic expressions and graphs, derived from the results of the parametric investigation, are proposed to design this kind of structure. |
