Stability of a newly proposed structural system, namely, the prebuckled or
prestressed dome with ring stiffener is investigated. The prestressed dome
is different from traditional domes in that it is made by first elastically
buckling shallow, straight radial members and then attaching them to their
supports. A special-purpose algorithm devised to consider a staged constru
ction method of the system using nonlinear finite-element models is impleme
nted into the program named DOME3D. Stability of the prestressed dome with
two different rise-to-span ratios is studied with a varying number of ring
stiffeners. The study shows that the stiffened system is not vulnerable to
loading imperfections leading to side-sway buckling. The stiffening methods
increased the limit load by more than 100% and changed the buckling mode o
f the system. For some stiffener configurations, the behavior of the stiffe
ned domes was similar to shell-like domes. The results showed that the stif
fening system leads to significant increase in the strength-to-weight ratio
of the novel type structure, and improvement in the overall stability beha
vior of the dome.