An experimental and numerical investigation on ultimate strength of corrugated bulkheads and plane bulkheads subjected to lateral pressure

As basic units of oil tankers and bulk carriers, corrugated bulkheads are usually subjected to lateral loads such as liquid cargo pressure. In this paper, the experiments have been designed and carried out to investigate the collapse modes and ultimate strength of corrugated bulkheads and plane bulkheads under lateral pressure. In the experiment, pure air pressure was used to apply uniformly distributed lateral pressure. The results show that ultimate capacity of corrugated bulkhead is significantly larger than that of traditional T-shaped stiffened plane bulkhead under the same weight of materials. The corrugated bulkhead reaches the ultimate limit state after three plastic hinges formed on the corrugation, and experimental results agree well with the nonlinear finite element analysis. In addition, through numerical analysis, it is found that the boundary conditions considered in this paper have little effect on the ultimate strength of corrugated bulkheads when in-plane displacements are restrained, and the stress and displacement distributions of the mid-span corrugation are similar with five bays of corrugations and above, and can well reflect the corrugated bulkheads in real ships. The results of this paper are helpful to understand the mechanism of corrugated bulkheads collapse and provide references for ultimate strength experimental designs of corrugated bulkhead structures. •Experiments have been designed and carried out for both corrugated and plane bulkhead structures under lateral pressure, by using the test method of pure air pressure loading without any intermediate medium between the tank and the air. This experimental setup can be further extended to such experiments with combined axial and lateral loads.•Numerical analyses are carried out, and both the ultimate strengths and collapse modes match well with the experiments. Collapse behavior has been carefully discussed based on experimental and numerical results.•The design advantages of the corrugated bulkhead are verified by the comparative experimental and numerical analysis of the corrugated bulkhead and the plane T-shaped stiffened plate bulkhead.•The elastic behavior, inelastic behavior and ultimate limit state of corrugated bulkhead under lateral pressure are obtained by comprehensive experimental test and finite element analysis. Also, it has reference value for the evaluation of the ultimate capacity of the corrugated bulkhead model in the actual ship.•The collapse mode of corrugat