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The Members’ Conference Brian Clancy has written to the Institution expressing grave concern at the forced cancellation of ‘Memcon ’, due to have taken place in Birmingham on 15 July (see Structural news for 4 July). We remind members that the conference was to have taken the form of four discussion sessions, with a reception and buffet-style dinner on the Friday evening and overnight accommodation offered at halls of residence at the University of Birmingham. The programme, drawn up after full consultation with the Branches, represented a ‘new initiative arranged for the benefit of members, to give them an opportunity to hear and express views on a wide range of topics. ’ Panel style discussions, with no formal speeches, were planned around topics included within the sessional themes of - the developing Institution - education & training - professional affairs - the future. Brian Clancy writes as follows: The Institution tries very hard to anticipate the wishes of the membership and to keep itself in the forefront of engineering development and practice. The recent decision to cancel the first ever Members’ Conference because of lack of support from the membership must therefore come as something of a surprise to those who thought it would be of interest to members. Clearly, Council did not anticipate the wishes of the members correctly. Verulam

Short stiffened plates with imperfections in the local buckling mode are studied under compression loading, using an elasto-plastic finite element program. A simplified large deflection elastic analysis based on the energy method is also employed, combined with a failure criterion governed by yield of the stiffener under membrane and shear stresses. Consideration is given to the behaviour of the stiffened plate as a whole and also its individual stiffener and panel elements, which may be considerably strengthened or weakened through interaction. Adverse interaction can render the stiffener strength predictions of BS 5400 unconservative. Slender stiffeners outside the geometric limits of the Code are also studied, and simplified design curves are presented. B.F. Ronalds