Buckling analysis of ring stiffened thin cylindrical shell under external pressure

Abstract

Submarine pressure hulls, fire-tube boilers, vacuum tanks, oil well casings, submersibles, underground pipelines, tunnels, rocket motor casing, etc., are some of the examples of thin cylindrical shell structures which collapse due to buckling under uniform pressure. To enhance the buckling strength of bare cylindrical shells, one of the best solutions is to stiffen them with ring stiffeners. In this work in order to predict the shell instability failure mode (SIFM) and general instability failure mode (GIFM) FE models are generated and analysed using buckling analysis of general-purpose FE software ANSYS. The numerical results obtained using FE analysis are compared with published analytical and experimental results. Hence in the present study efforts are taken to develop FE models to predict global and shell instability failure modes of externally ring stiffened cylindrical shells by using linear FE analysis. It is proposed to use full/half bare cylindrical shell FE models (L/R ratio upto 200) to determine SIFM and FE models with shell281- Beam189 (for stiffeners) can be used to determine GIFM. The developed FE models are validated by comparing numerical results with experimental results published by Seleim and Roorda [25]. By using both proposed FE models it is possible to predict the failure modes namely SIFM and GIFM, comparing their values of critical buckling pressures. The lower pressure value can indicate the possible failure mode.