16

J.G. Teng and J.M. Rotter

One common mode of buckling failure for a ring is out-of-plane buckling (Bushnell 1977), especially when it is attached to a shell junction or intersection. Several recent studies have been conducted on rings at shell junctions (Jumikis and Rotter 1983; Rotter and Jumikis 1985; Rotter 1987; Sharma et al. 1987; Teng and Rotter 1988, 1989d, 1991b, 1992c; Greiner 1991; Teng and Lucas 1994). Esslinger and Geier (1993) and Louca and Harding (1994) investigated the torsional buckling strength of ring stiffeners on externally pressurised cylinders. In the nite element modelling of ring-stiffened shells, each ring can be modelled either as an additional shell segment using shell theory or as a discrete ring (Bushnell 1985), but discrepancies often arise between the two treatments. This can arise either because the discrete ring model is poor, or because the shell theory fails to capture all behaviours. The most widely used nonlinear shell theory is that of Sanders (1963), which has been generally accepted as being accurate for thin shells for all practical purposes. However, Rotter and Jumikis (1988) cast doubt on the ability of Sanders theory in modelling buckling phenomena dominated by nonlinear strains arising from in-plane displacements and derived a new nonlinear theory for thin shells of revolution which includes nonlinear strain terms arising from in-plane displacements. Their theory, originally derived in 1982 (Jumikis and Rotter 1983), was later found to be identical to those independently derived by Combescure (1986), Su et al. (1987) and Yin et al. (1987). Teng and Hong (1998) later presented a set of straindisplacement relations of the same kind for shells of general form, which reduces to the above theory for shells of revolution. Furthermore, Teng and Hong showed that Sanders theory with the rotation about the normal retained can provide the correct buckling load for in-plane buckling of an annular plate that is modelled using shell elements, but that the simplied Sanders theory in which this rotation is omitted cannot. Local circumferential compression and shell junctions There is a class of shell structures in which localised circumferential compressive stresses arise under loads that give rise to tensile membrane stresses throughout most of the structure. The local compressive stresses can clearly cause buckling. Examples include torispherical and toriconical pressure vessel heads, circular plates under a transverse load, and hemispheres under axial tension. These problems are normally not very sensitive to initial imperfections because the circumferential compression is localised, and the two principal membrane stresses are both tensile at other points in the shell. Torispherical and toriconical shells have been studied extensively (e.g. Adachi and Benicek 1964; Galletly 1982, 1985; Galletly and Blachut 1985b; Roche and Autrusson 1986; Wunderlich et al. 1987; Galletly et al. 1990; Soric 1990, 1995; Lu et al. 1995) and design methods have been developed and included into several standards including the ECCS (1988) code. Hagihara et al. (1991) analysed the bifurcation buckling of torispherical heads dynamically loaded by internal pressure.