Cylindrical shells are easy to buckle under external pressure and need to be strengthened before they can be used in engineering. At present, the cylindrical shells are mainly enhanced by welding stiffeners inside them. However, for underwater pressure vessels, it is important to reduce the welding area. Some scholars have proposed various forms of corrugated shells, such as longitudinally corrugated shells, and studied the buckling behavior of corrugated shells under hydrostatic pressure. However, few studies have been conducted on such shells under the same weight conditions. Because an increase in the height of the corrugation necessarily leads to an increase in weight. So this reduces the comparability between the corrugated shells. The mechanism of non-uniform wall thickness on the improvement of shell material utilization is not explained. It is worth exploring how to achieve the best buckling performance under the limited weight. In this paper, the shape parameters of corrugations are explored, including the number, height and width of corrugations, and the coupling between them. The mechanical behavior of corrugated shell is studied from theory, FEA and experiment. In addition to hydrostatic pressure, the collapse of corrugated shells under concentrated pressure is also studied and comparative tests are carried out. The whole process of the collapse of the corrugated shell under concentrated pressure can be directly observed, and this is also an important performance index. In order to ensure the dimensional accuracy of the test samples, 3D printing technology was used for processing. In this paper, higher corrugations are not always better for the same weight. Because corrugation troughs tend to crack before buckling. This is like the short board effect, which requires collaborative optimization of peak and trough thickness.
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