Elastic-plastic Buckling Analysis of Q690 High Strength Steel Tubes Under Global Bending

Abstract

In recent years, high-strength steel has been used extensively for infrastructures because of its many advantages, such as its ductility and strain-hardening properties, which are inferior to those of ordinary structural steel, and the small dimensions of the structural elements, which lead to greater freedom and elegance in design, resulting in lighter structures. In practice, imperfections such as residual stresses due to the welding process and pre-buckling mode imperfections are inevitable in cylindrical structures made of high-strength steel. A small imperfection amplitude can lead to a disproportionate reduction in buckling strength. Therefore, imperfection sensitivity should be considered when studying the buckling behaviour of the shell. The influence of the combined residual stress and pre-buckling mode imperfection on the buckling behaviour of Q690 high strength steel cylindrical shell under global bending has not yet been investigated and described for all dimensions. In this paper, the combined imperfections influences on the buckling behaviour of high-strength steel cylindrical shell in global bending in the elastic-plastic range are investigated. Using the ABAQUS fine elements software, perfect cylinders with a constant length to thickness ratio equal to 7 and a radius to thickness ratio in the range 10≤ r/t ≤700 were considered to perform the linear bifurcation analysis (LBA) and the geometric nonlinear analysis (GNA). The non-linear analysis with imperfections (GNIA) and the geometric and material non-linear analysis with imperfections (GMNIA) were then performed considering imperfection amplitudes between 0.01 and 2 to derive the critical buckling loads known as bifurcation point for the models with different aspect ratio. The influences of the combined imperfections show that moderately and very thin cylinders are very sensitive to the increase of the pre-buckling mode imperfection amplitude and their buckling strength is insensitive to plasticity. For thick cylinders, the effect of plasticity is more consistent, while the buckling strength is not significantly affected by the increase in pre-buckling mode imperfection amplitude. The main objective is to predict the buckling sensitivity of cylinders under the influence of combined residual stress and pre-buckling mode imperfection. The obtained results, comments and conclusions intend to allow for safer.