Elastic buckling analysis of ring-stiffened cylindrical shells under general pressure loading via the Ritz method

摘要

This paper presents the Ritz method for the elastic buckling analysis of shells with ring stiffeners under general pressure loading. The stiffeners may be of any crosssectional shape and arbitrarily distributed along the shell length. Using polynomial functions multiplied by boundary equations raised to appropriate powers as the Ritz functions, the method can accom- modate any combination of end conditions. As far as it is known, the Ritz method has not been automated in this way for the buckling of ring-stiffened shells. By formulating in a nondimensional form, generic buckling solutions for shells with various end conditions, stiff- ener distributions and under various pressure distributions, were presented. These new buckling solutions should serve as useful reference sources for checking the validity and accuracy of other numerical methods and software for buckling of cylindrical shells. This paper also shows that the appropnate distribution of ring stiffeners can lead to a significant increase in the buckling capacity over that of a stiffened shell with evenly spaced and identical ring stiffeners.