Buckling behaviour of underwater vessels by experimental, numerical and analytical approaches

Abstract

This paper reports the buckling behaviour of glass/vinylester polymer composite filament wound shells of underwater vessels. The shells were tested for buckling under hydrostatic loading and the corresponding strains were experimentally measured using strain gauges. Numerical analysis was performed for critical buckling pressure, stresses and strains using ANSYS. Von-Mises stresses corresponding to hydrostatic pressures were computed analytically. The numerical results of critical buckling pressure for 10 mm thick vessels showed 7.12 % deviation from those of the experimental results because of the imposed boundary conditions, possibility of multiple configurations of the shell to deform around the buckling load and not accounting for initial imperfections in the shell in the Finite Element Analysis. The microstrains predicted by FEA were in good agreement with the experimental strains before the onset of buckling. Von-Mises stresses predicted by FEA agreed well with those of the analytical computations. © 2014 ANAME Publication. All rights reserved.