158

R. Greiner

where d is the diameter. This formula gives good results for short- and medium-length cylinders under full external pressure (including the pressure on the end plates). Neglecting the second term in the denominator makes it equivalent with Eq. (7) of Ebner (1952) for medium-length shells. Length-specic effect due to the loading conditions of external pressure with and without pressurised end plates: Overall loaded shells show differences in their buckling resistance compared with shells pressurised only at their circumferential surface, and this effect depends on the lenght parameter of the shell. While long and medium-long shells are practically unaffected by the end plate pressure, the effect on short shells shows an increase when the length is shorter and the plate behaviour dominates. The plate buckling coefcient k , being k = 2 for overall loading, changes to k = 4 for pure circumferential loading. The effects are shown in more detail in Fig. 5.4.

Effect of boundary conditions Boundary conditions of shells should be divided into membrane terms and bending terms. The following ve boundary conditions are considered and are written in the usual notation. C3 and C4 stand for clamped, S3 and S4 for simply supported and F for free. Apparently, the rst two conditions express the membrane part and the second two the bending part: C3 : nx = v = w = w = 0 C4 : u = v = w = w = 0 S3 : nx = v = w = mx = 0 S4 : u = v = w = mx = 0
F : nx = nxy = qx = mx = 0

(the so-called classical boundary condition)

In accordance with the characteristic length-specic shell behaviour discussed above, the effects of the specic boundary conditions depend on the length of the shell. In the range of the medium cylinder length only the membrane conditions are governing. For decreasing length the effect of the bending conditions increases gradually until for very short cylinders the plate behaviour is dependent only on the bending terms. For long cylinders, the inuence of the boundary conditions ceases to apply. This behaviour is illustrated in Fig. 5.3 for the case of overall uniform pressure. If the buckling pressure qcr is related to E(r/l)(t/r)2.5 according to Eq. (7), the buckling resistance in the medium-length range remains constant for equal membrane boundary conditions. A more detailed illustration for the range of short