Comprehensive study of aluminium alloy plates under compression conditions

Abstract Aluminium alloys have been vital for the progress of many technologies during the last decades. In particular, most stiffeners in aerospace structures are composed of aluminium panels often solicited with elastic and plastic bucking under particular boundary and loading conditions. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the difficulties encountered to predict the incipient elastic–plastic buckling for thin aluminium plates under combined compressive loads. The used methodology was an analytic non-linear approach, validated further with an experimental investigation. In fact, the instability of thin elastic–plastic rectangular panels made of 2024 T45 alloys is analyzed. In this study, general concept of the Von Kaman's equation with a set of trigonometric and harmonic functions was used in the analytic model. A methodology to develop this kind of analytic resolution is pointed out and has been illustrated for a set of variables. This paper presents a stable and low-cost analytic solution to deal with instability phenomenon in elastic and plastic range for the design of light alloy aluminium plates. This approach was applied to assess the conditions for which plastic buckling phenomenon can happen when particularly thin aluminium panels are used. This latter, can be implemented in finite element standard codes.