Buckling of an egg-shaped shell with varying wall thickness under uniform external pressure

ABSTRACT

The paper is devoted to a kind of egg-shaped shell with varying wall thickness subjected to uniform external pressure. The numerical buckling performances of several such shells are presented, which are compared with corresponding equivalent egg-shaped shells with uniform wall thickness. It is indicated that the buckling capacity of egg-shaped shells with varying wall thickness is greatly improved; furthermore, such shells are less sensitive to initial geometric imperfections than those with uniform wall thickness. To validate the proposed numerical approach, three nominally identical egg-shaped shells is tentatively fabricated, accurately measured, slowly tested, and numerically studied. A good agreement between experiments and computations are obtained.

KEYWORDS:

• Egg-shaped shell
• atypical shell of revolution
• varying wall thickness
• external pressure
• buckling

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Zhangjiakou Xiangyu Machinery Co., Ltd., for their help with manufacturing the experimental specimens. Also, the authors would like to express their gratefulness to the anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments significantly improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, J Z, upon reasonable request.

ORCID

Jian Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0201-2331

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 51709132 and 51679133]; The Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant number BK20150469] and the study abroad scholarships of Jiangsu Province.