Buckling severity measurement of axially compressed cylindrical structures with periodic buckling pattern

Abstract

We introduced a simplified method to measure the buckling severity of the cylindrical structures subjected to axial compression. The method is intended for the cylindrical structures with a buckling mode comprising a repetition of similar single tiers, and estimates an upper bound of the deformed surface shape of the structure from measurements of a few data points. Moreover, this method helps monitor the magnitude of surface distortion of the large-sized buckled cylindrical structures with full-field surface shapes that are usually problematic for measurement. The discussion of classical buckling theory reveals that the point-to-point variation of radial displacements on cylindrical structures with periodic buckling pattern is similarly distributed even when the buckling mode changes depending on the structure’s size. A fundamental probability distribution model governing the point-to-point variation of the radial displacements is established from the results. A computation procedure for the conservative upper bound (CUB) of radial displacements from measurements at a few data points is proposed. A buckling experiment on cylindrical structures under axial compression demonstrated that the CUB from the proposed method appropriately envelopes the radial displacement of the buckled cylindrical structure within a designated probability, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method. The study offers a novel method to compute the magnitude of the surface distortion of buckled cylindrical structures from a few measurements.