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Buckling of thin shells: an overview

a cylindrical shell under axial compression, this implies that the compressed cylinder is free to expand laterally under Poisson effects. However, the ends of most shells are not free to expand in either experiments or real structures, so local bending stresses and deformations arise near the ends, and these can reduce the buckling load of the axially compressed cylinder. These stresses increase in a nonlinear manner as the axial load increases and they depend on both the shell length and the boundary conditions, so their complete effect took some time to be fully established. They were rst investigated by Fischer (1962, 1963) and Stein (1962, 1964), who reported that the buckling strength could be half the classical value. However, it was not recognised until the later work of Hoff and his co-workers (Hoff 1966) that this strength loss was caused by the relaxed boundary condition of freedom to displace circumferentially, and similar reductions were obtained using the assumption of a simple membrane prebuckling stress state. More thorough studies (Fischer 1965; Almroth 1966; Gorman and Evan-Iwanowski 1970; Yamaki and Kodama 1972) showed that the effect of prebuckling deformations is generally small (15%) and cannot be the primary reason for the dramatic difference between theory and experiment, or for the great scatter in test results. Boundary conditions The effect of different boundary conditions on the buckling strength of cylindrical shells was explored extensively, with particular attention to the boundary conditions that affect the displacements and the membrane stresses during the buckling process. It should be noted that the ends of the shell have three translational and one rotational degrees of freedom, and that restraint of any of these during buckling induces corresponding stresses which affect the buckling strength. As noted above, under membrane prebuckling stresses (Ohira 1961, 1963; Stein 1962; Hoff 1965, 1966; Hoff and Reheld 1965; Hoff and Soong 1965; Almroth 1966), it was discovered that the greatest sensitivity to boundary conditions occurs if the shell ends are free to displace in the circumferential direction during buckling, halving of the buckling stress. It was initially thought that this might be a cause of the low buckling strengths achieved in tests, but it was soon evident that this effect is both insufcient and an unrealistic explanation for the difference between the classical prediction and experimental strengths, since such boundary conditions rarely exist in either laboratory or constructed shells. Other boundary condition changes have a much smaller effect, and it is particularly notable that a change from simply supported to built-in ends has little effect for most practical lengths of cylinder. Extensive information on the effects of different boundary conditions may be found in Yamaki (1984). Loading eccentricities and non-uniformities For axially compressed isotropic cylinders, small eccentricities in the line of action of the total load do not have a major inuence on the buckling strength

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