Buckling Behaviour of Imperfect Spherical Shells Subjected to Different Load Conditions

摘要

The paper deals with an analysis of the bifurcation and initial post-buckling behaviour of highly imperfection-sensitive large spherical shells, such as cargo tanks for ship transportation of liquefied natural gas and large spherical containment shells for nuclear power plants. The numerical analysis procedure has sufficient generality to treat shells of revolution with arbitrary curved generators and with arbitrary variation of the thickness. The shells can be subjected to non-axisymmetric time-varying loadings. The purpose of the paper is to present simple procedures for scantling selections in the initial design phase and to propose an analysis procedure for verification of the final design of optimized thin-walled spherical shells.