STABILITY ANALYSIS OF SHELLS OF REVOLUTION ON NONLINEAR ELASTIC FOUNDATIONS

In many practical applications, thin shells are in contact with soils or other solids. Such situations arise in cylindrical bulk solid stora ge silos, above-ground and underground liquid storage tanks, undergrou nd pipelines, ballistic missiles filled with solid propellants, and co ncrete-filled steel tubular columns. As a result, many studies have be en carried out on the analysis and behavior of shells on elastic found ations. However, little has been done on shells on nonlinear elastic f oundations, despite the fact that foundation behavior is generally non linear. This paper presents a finite element formulation for the buckl ing analysis of shells of revolution on nonlinear elastic foundations. To achieve a versatile foundation model, the foundation reaction-disp lacement relationship is represented by a number of discrete data poin ts (referred to as the Discrete-Point or DP Model in this paper). Any specific nonlinear functions such as polynomials can be treated as spe cial cases of this model and accurately represented by a sufficiently large number of data points. The validity and capability of the presen t analysis are demonstrated through numerical comparisons. The paper a lso presents the first set of verified numerical results for buckling of shells on nonlinear elastic foundations, which can be used to bench mark results from other sources in the future. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scien ce Ltd. All rights reserved.