The use of high tensile steel plates is increasing in the fabrication of ship and offshore structures. The main portion of ship structure is usually composed of stiffened plates. In these structures, plate buckling is one of the most important design criteria and buckling load may usually be obtained as an eigenvalue solution of the governing equations for the plate. To use the high tensile steel plate effectively, its thickness may become thin so that the occurrence of buckling is inevitable and design allowing plate buckling may be necessary. When the panel elastic buckling is allowed, it is necessary to get precise understandings about the post-buckling behaviour of thin plates. It is well known that a thin flat plate undergoes secondary buckling after initial buckling took place and the deflection of the initial buckling mode was developed. From this point of view, this paper discusses the post-buckling behaviour of thin plates under thrust including the secondary buckling phenomenon. Series of elastic large deflection analyses were performed on rectangular plates with aspect ratio 3.6 using the analytical method and the FEM.

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