Deformation and failure mechanisms of lattice cylindrical shells under axial loading

Abstract

The lattice cylindrical shells wound from the planar lattice plates, which have significant applications in aerospace engineering, exhibit different deformation modes with their planar counterparts because of the curvature of the cell wall. In this paper, deformation mechanisms are systematically investigated and failure analyses are conducted for the lattice cylindrical shells with various core topologies. Analytical models are proposed to predict the axial stiffness, critical elastic buckling load or effective yield strength of these shells. Finite element simulations are carried out to identify the validity of the models. The models can be employed for the optimal design. As an example, we construct the failure map for the Kagome lattice cylindrical shell made from an elastic ideally-plastic material. Various failure mechanisms, including yielding, global elastic buckling and local elastic buckling are taken into account. Moreover, optimizations are performed to minimize the weight for a given stiffness or load-carrying capacity for three types of lattice cylindrical shells. It is found that the Kagome and triangular lattice cylindrical shells have almost equivalent load-bearing capacity and both significantly outperform the hexagonal one under axial compression.