Postbuckling of an axially compressed oval cylindrical shell

Abstract

The present study represents an extension of the work on the problem of the nonlinear (postbuckling) behavior of a noncircular (oval) cylindrical shell under axial compression reported on earlier by the authors [1, 2]. In these reports attention was focused on the “far” postbuckling region, and not on the initial postbuckling region. In [2] it was found that, for a sufficiently out-of-round cylinder, the postbuckling region exhibited a relative maximum load which could exceed the classical buckling load. Thus, it was suggested that, for practical purposes, oval cylinders with sufficiently eccentric cross sections, might be less sensitive to initial imperfections than circular cylinders.