A computer study of the buckling of an imperfect cylindrical shell

Abstract

An existing computer program for the geometrically nonlinear analysis of arbitrarily loaded shells of revolution was modified to incorporate initial geometric imperfections into the buckling solution of an axially loaded circular cylindrical shell. Several different boundary conditions were considered, and the predicted buckling loads were examined to determine the significance of the initial imperfections and the boundary conditions for the shell stability problem. The computed buckling loads were compared to those found experimentally by Arbocz and Babcocl at the California Institute of Technology. The computed results were generally higher than the experimental results. It was indicated that imperfection sensitivity is dependent on the boundary conditions of the cylinder.