Buckling of long thick-walled circular cylindrical shells of isotropic incompressible hyperelastic materials under uniform external pressure

Abstract

For isotropic incompressible hyperelastic materials, the problem of determining the critical external pressure at which a long thick-walled circular cylindrical shell will buckle involves solving a fourth-order system of highly non-homogeneous, ordinary differential equations. Closed-form solutions of this system are derived here for plane-strain conditions and for the particular case of the Varga material. These solutions are used to derive the buckling criterion and numerical values are obtained for the resulting critical pressures. They are found to be in good agreement with existing theoretical and experimental results for the neo-Hookean material.