Post-Buckling Analysis of Cylindrical Shells

Abstract

A method is presented for the calculation of the critical load and post-buckling displacements of elastic structures, and is demonstrated on circular cylindrical shells. The critical load is found by successive extrapolations of the load with the aid of the tangent stiffness matrix determinant. The buckling mode shape is calculated at the instability point and the prebuckling displacements are perturbed a small amount proportional to this mode shape in order to determine an equilibrium state in the post-buckling range. A modified Newton-Raphson iteration technique is utilized to trace the post-buckling load-displacement curve.