Postbuckling Analyses of Elastic Cylindrical Shells under Axial Compression

Abstract

For the buckling problem of circular cylindrical shells under axial compression, experimental results show that after the primary buckling, the secondary buckling takes place accompanying successive reductions in the number of the circumferential waves at every path jumping. In this paper we traced this successive buckling of circular cylindrical shells using the latest in general-purpose FEM technology with the static stabilizing method with the aid of artificial damping for the local instability. The studies accomplish a fully automatic and seamless simulation of the successive path jumping in the deep postbuckling region, and show a good agreement with Yamaki's experimental results.