No abstract

The prediction and reliability evaluation of ultimate compressive strength of stiffened composite panels are both essential for safe structural design. In this paper, the progressive failure analysis method is utilized to predict ultimate compressive strength of stiffened composite panels by using ABAQUS. Since a large number of ultimate compressive strength must be analyzed in the process of reliability evaluation by using standard reliability methods, the relationship between the buckling load and the ultimate compressive strength is used to establish a new limit state function to reduce the computational efforts. Only one time the ultimate compressive strength is analyzed in the process of reliability evaluation by using the proposed method. The results of numerical examples show that (a) the relative errors between the ultimate compressive strength obtained by using the proposed method and the experimental data are 2.53% and 1.68% for samples A and B, respectively; (b) the reliability results obtained by using the proposed method are very close to the ones obtained by using the classical method, and the ratios of the proposed method to the classical method are only 1.18% and 1.66% for samples A and B in terms of the total computational time.