BUCKLING OF CYLINDRICAL COMPOSITE SHELLS UNDER DEFORMATION-RELATED LOADS BY USING FINITE STRIP METHOD

Abstract

Current advances in today’s industries increasingly expand the need for using composite materials in order to achieve desirable characteristics. Regarding the important role these materials play in engineering sciences, conducting precise analysis on such composites is admitted to be of great significance. One of the greatest weaknesses of these composites is their Shear Strength; hence, since the shear deformation has been ignored in the Classic Theory, the First Order Shear Theory has been adapted in the present paper. Deformation-related loads are loads in line with the loads resulted from deformation process which are usually being considered constant to facilitate load direction analyses. Shell materials have been set to be layered composites and the calculation method is of semi-analytical type. Displacement functions are defined as the combination of Fourier series in the perimeter dimension of shell and polynomial functions in the length dimension of shell. Results gathered from the proposed software for buckling of cylindrical shells have been compared with results from other references and also with those from ABAQUS finite element software suite.