Cylindrical shells under uniform external pressure

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Accordingly, they can only resist low pressures compared to the case of axial loading with its small pattern of buckles. However, since the loading usually comes from vacuum-related problems of containments, the range of the external pressure is widely limited by the atmospheric pressure. Different are cases of hydrostatic loads of submarine structures, which, therefore, usually require stiffening of the shell wall. In accordance with the buckling pattern of large buckles extending over the whole length of the shell, the effects of the cylinder length, of the restraining conditions at the boundaries and of the length of the pressurised zone (band pressure) have great inuence. The same holds for the effects of variable (e.g. stepped) wall thickness, since the thicker courses exercise restraining conditions onto the thinner wall. Amplication of the buckling pressure is most economically reached by ring-stiffening of the shell. These effects are dealt with in the following with the main emphasis on the essential results. The derivation of the solutions may be very different from case to case and is only discussed in general form. Uniform external pressure is understood as constant along the length of the shell in the following, which means that axially varying pressures like hydrostatic pressure are not considered here (see Weingarten 1962). The theoretical buckling resistance is expressed in the form of the buckling stress cr or alternatively in form of the buckling resistance qcr . In general, it holds that r cr = qcr t

Cylindrical shells with constant wall thickness

Short, medium and long cylinders The basic classical case is the cylinder with simply supported ends, that is, radially restrained, axially and rotationally unrestrained. The solutions of the socalled linear buckling theory may be taken from, for example, Flgge (1973, 1981). The buckling pressure can be obtained by variation of the circumferential wave number m only, since in longitudinal direction the wave number is always 1, expressing the shape of a half-sine wave. The buckling behaviour differs considerably with different cylinder lengths. (The appropriate for the cylinder length is the length parameter accounting parameter (l/r) r/t or (l/r) t/r depending on the range of length.) This different behaviour may also be expressed by length-specic buckling formulae derived from the exact Flgge solutions by appropriately neglecting certain terms of minor signicance. Short cylinders are highly inuenced by the bending stiffness in axial direction and with shorter length approach the buckling resistance of plates, that is, a platestrip of the length of the circumference. Medium-length cylinders are practically