HAT STIFFENED PLATES FOR SHIP BUILDING

The key interest in ship building is to design a ship having minimum weight and maximum strength. Usage of open sections like Flat bar, Angle bar, Holland Profile and Tee bar are common in ship structure. The stiffeners of closed section offer numerous advantages as much from the structural as from the economic point of view. Hat Stiffened Plate has a number of closed profile stiffeners provided along dominant direction. A representative unit cell of Hat Stiffened Plate has been selected and numerical investigations using finite element software ANSYS have been carried out to quantify the structural advantages of hat shaped stiffeners over the commonly used open section stiffeners like flat bar, angle and tee sections. Hat stiffeners can very effectively be used in the design of lighter ships