Buckling of thin shells: an overview

All these considerations make the task of reliable and economic adoption of imperfection sensitivity into the design process a very considerable challenge. Research on imperfection measurement Most early research on imperfection sensitivity was concerned with idealised imperfection forms and imperfections in small-scale laboratory models, but it has now been well recognised that these are generally not representative of real imperfections in full-scale structures. In aerospace structures, Babcock, Arbocz, Singer and their colleagues (Arbocz and Babcock 1981; Arbocz 1982, 1991; Singer 1982b; Weller et al. 1986; Elishakoff et al. 1987; Arbocz and Hol 1991; Singer and Abramovich 1995) pioneered the precise measurement of imperfections in both laboratory and full-scale shells. Different techniques were required for fullscale civil engineering shells, and these were developed later by Clarke and Rotter (1988), Coleman et al. (1992) and Ding et al. (1996a,b). Others later applied similarly thorough measurement techniques to laboratory models (Blachut et al. 1991; Chryssanthopoulos et al. 1991a,b; Chryssanthopoulos and Poggi 1995; Berry et al. 1996, 2000; Teng et al. 2001; Zhao and Teng 2001; Lin and Teng 2002). Their work naturally demonstrated that both the form and the amplitude of imperfections are dependent on the fabrication process and quality. For aeronautical shells, an International Imperfection Data Bank was established with branches in Delft and Haifa for the evaluation of imperfection measurements and correlation studies (Arbocz 1982; Singer 1982b). They also developed statistically based design methods using measured imperfections, but these generally only apply to a dened manufacturing process, where the data relates to structures that are in production and can be measured. The task set out at the beginning of this section remains substantially un-researched: although the substantial effect of imperfections on shell strength is well known, and measurement techniques have been devised and used, much further development is needed to devise reliable methods that can adopt this knowledge into the design process. In particular, the power of computational methods will remain untapped until these questions can be properly resolved. Studies of specic problems involving uniform loads Studies of cylindrical shells Many other interesting studies have been conducted on shells under uniform loads. Examples include the interaction between different basic load cases on both unstiffened cylinders (e.g. Galletly et al. 1987; Shen and Chen 1991) and stiffened cylinders (e.g. Agelidis et al. 1982; Miller and Vojta 1984; Croll 1985; Abramovich et al. 1991; Dowling 1991). Most of these interaction studies involve compressive stresses in more than one direction. However, the effect of internal