Elastic buckling and postbuckling behaviour of widely-stiffened conical shells under axial compression

In thin-walled shells of revolution with widely-spaced meridional stiffener s loaded in compression, a local panel buckling may develop. For the partic ular case of cylindrical panels, the buckling and postbuckling behaviour ha s been investigated in detail, whereas limited research is available for th e more general case of conical panels. In this paper, the linear and non-li near elastic buckling response of the conical panel is studied for a wide r ange of shell and stiffening parameters by means of an appropriate finite e lement model. The classical buckling load is determined on the basis of lin ear analysis. The imperfection sensitivity is studied through non-linear an alysis of imperfect conical panels with imperfections affine to the critica l mode. Different aspects of the behaviour are quantified through suitably defined curvature parameters. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights res erved.