Mechanics-Based Screening of Stiffener Tripping in Axially Compressed Ship T-Stiffened Panels Under Parametric Uncertainty

Axially compressed ship T-stiffened panels may change from plate or beam–column buckling to stiffener tripping. Coupled lateral bending and twisting can weaken support to the plating and accelerate post-peak strength degradation, making mode identification important for structural proportioning. This study presents a mechanics-based procedure for screening tripping-related responses under prescribed material and dimensional uncertainty. Shared input realizations are mapped to plate slenderness, column slenderness, and scaled torsional rigidity and evaluated using a fixed ridge-logistic response associated with a 300-configuration development grid. Threshold-domain occupancy and mean classifier response provide complementary aggregation measures. Specimen comparisons and twelve additional finite-element analyses provide separate checks of load capacity and sectional response trends. Increasing web height from 75 to 95 mm increases stiffener lateral displacement at the respective ultimate loads from approximately 0.55 to 1.12 mm, whereas increasing web thickness from 4.5 to 5.5 mm reduces it from approximately 0.56 to 0.49 mm. In the reported propagation comparison, shared-input and independent-descriptor sampling differ by up to approximately 0.049 in threshold-domain occupancy and 0.041 in mean response. Continuous and threshold aggregation assign 23 configurations to different internal screening bands. The procedure quantifies how input assumptions and aggregation rules affect screening assignments for the same nominal designs. Its outputs support comparative screening, not independently validated governing-mode predictions or calibrated physical failure probabilities.