Cylindrical shells under global shear loading

237

1.2 R/t = 200 1.0 Load ratio P/Pcrit 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 0.0 w0 /t = 0 w0 /t = 1

0.2

0.4 0.6 Horizontal displacement (mm)

0.8

1.0

Figure 9.8 Postcritical behaviour, geometric imperfection inuence (nite element simulations).

the amplitude of the geometric imperfections was approximately equal to the shell thickness. A numerical study of global shear buckling using ABAQUS was performed by Kokubo et al. (1995) examining several imperfection forms. They concluded that the only important geometric imperfection form was afne to the elastic shear buckling mode. Even in this most pessimistic case, the buckling strength was found to be reduced by only about 20%. For thicker shells (R/t = 200), their nonlinear elasticplastic simulations included geometric imperfections in the form of the perfect elastic shell eigenmode with an amplitude equal to shell thickness. They found that these imperfections did not affect the peak load dramatically, and that the postbuckling load path was not greatly affected by the imperfections (Fig. 9.8). Using test results from cylindrical shells with R/t of either 100 or 210 (Fig. 9.9), Murakami et al. (1989) proposed a strength reduction factor to account for the equivalent amplitude of the geometric imperfection under shear loading: if this amplitude is less than the thickness, the reduction factor is taken as = 1.0. = 1.18 1 + 0.18(w0 /t)0.65 for w0 /t 1 (7)

in which w0 is the amplitude of the geometric imperfection. For plastic design, they recommended the same empirical interaction formula that had been proposed by Galletly and Blachut (1985) coupled with the elastic buckling equation (Eq. 4) of Timoshenko and Gere (1961) to calculate the elastic or plastic critical shear load.