Development of Design Formula for Predicting Post-Buckling Behaviour and Ultimate Strength of Cylindrical Shell

Abstract

Cylindrical shells are often used in ship structures at deck plating with a camber, side shell plating at fore and aft parts, and bilge structure part. It has been believed that such curved shells can be modelled fundamentally by a part of a cylinder under axial compression. From the estimations with the usage of cylinder models, it is known that, in general, curvature increases the buckling strength of a curved shell subjected to axial compression, and that curvature is also expected to increase the ultimate strength. We conduct series of elasto-plastic large deflection analyses in order to clarify the fundamentals in buckling and plastic collapse behaviour of cylindrical shells under axial compression. From the numerical results, we derive design formula for predicting the ultimate strength of cylindrical shell, based on a series of the nonlinear finite element calculations for all edges, simply supporting plating, varying the slenderness ratio, curvature and aspect ratio, as well as the following design formulae for predicting the ultimate strength of cylindrical shell. From a number of analysis results, fitting curve can be developed to use parameter of slenderness ratio with implementation of the method of least squares. The accuracy of design formulae for evaluating ultimate strength has been confirmed by comparing the calculated results with the FE-analysis results and it has a good agreement to predict their ultimate strength.