Buckling under external pressure of cylinders with either torispherical or hemispherical end closures

Abstract

In a number of applications, the actual boundary conditions at the ends of a cylinder are not taken into account properly when the structure is being designed against buckling. For example, in the design of submersibles the older theoretical treatments assume that bulkheads are present at the ends of the cylinders, whereas this form of construction is not always used. The purpose of the investigation described here is to study the effect of realistic boundary conditions on the elastic buckling pressure of unstiffened cylinders with torispherical or hemispherical end closures. In the present study only perfect, initially stress-free, structures are considered and their theoretical buckling pressures are obtained from a variational finite-difference program written for the digital computer. The numerical results presented were obtained from a limited parametric survey of the problem. In the main, linear buckling theory was used. However, as is shown, this can sometimes lead to unsafe predictions. The buckling pressures for the cylinders with hemispherical end closures, as predicted by the variational finite-difference technique, are also compared with a modified von Mises formula with corrections for the end closures. The agreement between the two sets of predictions was good within the range of the survey.