The postbuckling behaviour of blade-stiffened carbon-epoxy panels loaded in compression
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Abstract
An experimental study has been performed to investigate the postbuckling behaviour of blade-stiffened carbon-epoxy panels loaded in compression. The panel skin-laminates consisted of only a few layers due to the relatively low design loads, which implied that certain coupling terms in the stiffness matrices were thought to be no longer insignificant. Full scale panels and short columns with two different skin lay-ups have been tested. The full scale panels buckled in a global mode and did not show any postbuckling strength. The short columns, buckling in a local mode, supported approximately 1.8 times the initial buckling load before failure. Analytical results from a non-linear general shell finite element analysis show a good agreement with the test results; analytical results obtained from an efficient elastic buckling analysis computer code give good results only in case of the local buckling mode. The influence of the coupling terms on the buckling behaviour of the specimens is relatively small: it decreases the buckling load slightly, does not change the end shortening curves significantly and is mainly apparent in the out-of-plane deflections.