BUCKLING OF COMPOSITE CIRCULAR CYLINDRICAL-SHELLS WITH RANDOM MATERIAL PROPERTIES

Composite materials exhibit a scatter in their properties. This is gen erally ignored in conventional structural analysis leading to results that may be non-conservative. The present study discusses the critical buckling analysis for circular cylindrical shells of laminated compos ites incorporating the effects of randomness in the material propertie s. A perturbation approach has been employed to develop expressions fo r the mean and variance of the critical buckling load in terms of mate rial property statistics. Working of the approach has been illustrated with an example. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.