Postbuckling simulation of curved stiffened composite panels by the use of strip elements

The buckling and postbuckling behaviour of stiffened composite panels is investigated in this paper. For the analysis a procedure is applied that is based on the discretisation of the structure by strip elements. This procedure enables the determination of element stiffness matrices representing analytical solutions of the governing differential equations. Next to the presentation of the underlying theory, numerical results are given for a curved stiffened panel configuration. In order to verify the applicability of the approach, a comparison to experimental results is included.