Cylindrical shells under combined loading

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fy = 240 N/mm2 and l/r = 1.0 was chosen to investigate the effects that result from a variation of the wall thickness, the imperfection pattern and the boundary conditions. On the top left of Fig. 10.9, the wall thickness is varied while the BCs are the same (C1). The linear elastic buckling modes for pure axial compression have, in the three investigated cases, n 3 half-waves in the longitudinal direction and m 5 full waves in the circumferential direction. Thus, the wave numbers were sufcient to induce the local bending effects that lower the carrying capacity of imperfect thick shells which buckle inelastically. These axial compression eigenmodes were used as the equivalent imperfection pattern. Analogously to practical shells which have one single determined imperfection pattern due to the production process without respect to any actual load combination, the same equivalent imperfection pattern was used for any loading path in this gure. The shape of the interaction curve is more convex the smaller the r/t ratio becomes; thus, the growing inuence of the biaxial stress state is visible. On the top right of Fig. 10.9, the imperfection pattern is varied. The boundary conditions are C1 and the r/t ratio is 100. Three patterns were investigated: the pure axial compression eigenmode (EM) as described for the top left gure, the EM for pure torsion and the EM of each load path (stress ratio), respectively. In the latter case the imperfection pattern varies within the set of calculations for one specic interaction curve. As visible in the range of dominating axial compressive stresses, the EM belonging to the combined loading is not necessarily the equivalent imperfection pattern which yields the lowest buckling load. The EM for pure axial compression yields higher pure external pressure buckling loads, because the high imperfection wave number in the axial direction is very different from the external pressure buckling mode of the perfect shell and therefore has a stiffening effect rather than a knock-down effect. Contrary to that, the torsion EM with only one half-wave in axial direction yields a rather good approximation for the pure external pressure buckling load. On the bottom of Fig. 10.9, two different boundary conditions C1 and additionally, S3 are investigated. The imperfection pattern is held constant as the EM for pure axial compression. The effect on the axial compression buckling strength is very small, though the effect on the pure external pressure buckling load due to the axial restraint is signicant. Figure 10.10 shows a similar study for the interaction of axial compression and torsion. The larger the r/t -ratio, the more similar are the GMNIA interaction curves to the straight LA/GNA curves. The more the failure occurs in the range of plastic buckling, the more the interaction curves follow the yield limit curve asymptotically. An investigation of interactive buckling under external pressure and torsion is omitted herein because it is of minor practical importance and because the shapes of the parabola-type LA curves and the bi-quadratical GMNA curves (see Fig. 10.8, bottom) are very similar. No signicant inuences of the imperfections on the real buckling interaction could be identied.