Offshore installations are exposed to hydrocarbon explosion and/or fire accidents. Especially, explosions lead serious damages to human, safety and environment. To minimize and prevent the damage from explosions, blast walls are generally installed in oil and gas production structures. Typical blast walls are divided into flat, corrugated, and stiffened type of blast walls. Among of them, corrugated blast walls are frequently used for reasons such as construction, cost, and energy absorption etc.However, it has been known that corrugated type of blast wall buckles between web and flange under the explosion loads, and it loses its stiffness. It means that the buckling phenomenon of blast wall is closely related to the structural strength. This study focuses on the structural characteristics of blast wall under quasi-static and dynamic (explosion) loads according to with or without flat-plated stiffener. Finally, it could be concluded that flat type of stiffener is located at the buckling region to delay the buckling and improve the strength of blast walls. KeywordsOffshore installations, corrugated blast wall, buckling, stiffened blast wall, nonlinear finite element analysis

In the present paper, to clarify and examine the fundamental buckling behaviours of cylindrically curved plates subjected to axial loading, a series of elastic and elasto-plastic large deflection analyses as well as elastic eigen buckling analysis are performed together with the comparisons with the buckling behaviours of circular cylinder. On the basis of the numerical results, the effects of curvature, magnitude of initial imperfection, slenderness ratio and aspect ratio on the characteristics of the buckling and post buckling collapse behavior of cylindrically curved plates and circular cylinders under axial compression are discussed. The buckling strength and ultimate strength formulae of the cylindrically curved plate are empirically derived based on the FEM series analysis by curve fitting using least square method. The validity of the ultimate strength formulations developed in this study has to some extent been verified through comparison with nonlinear numerical solutions.