Buckling of corrugated steel plates under uniaxial compression

Corrugated steel plates are widely used in engineering industries for their superior out-of-plane stiffness and buckling properties. The more complex corrugated configurations than plane steel plates lead to complicated and variable buckling behaviors of corrugated steel plates. The extremely high sensitivity of the plate buckling to geometric characteristics and initial imperfections further improves the difficulty of buckling analysis of corrugated steel plates. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the buckling behavior of corrugated steel plates under uniaxial compression based on 12 test specimens and 512 numerical models with multiple evaluation dimensions such as failure modes, buckling displacements, buckling loads, and buckling strengths. Parametric studies are carried out to reveal the influence mechanisms of critical parameters, including plate thickness, plate height, and number of corrugations. Furthermore, an analytical model developed based on the orthotropic plate theory is proposed for the buckling analysis of corrugated steel plates under uniaxial compression, and a semi-analytical solution for the assessment of the buckling strength is presented with satisfactory accuracy and universality of application. Relevant theoretical results are able to realize the efficient estimation of the buckling strength more than the correlation level of 0.99. The research results can serve as references for subsequent studies and provide valuable support for the engineering structural design of corrugated steel plates.