ABSTRACT
A circular cylindrical shell is one of the most widespread models of thin-walled load-bearing structures made of conventional or composite materials. Wide use of thin-walled circular cylindrical structures in various branches of industry and relative simplicity of equations describing circular cylindrical shells is one of the reasons for their long, intensive study. This chapter considers one-dimensional problems corresponding to some particular loading conditions. In the general case, a circular cylindrical shell can be loaded with concentrated and distributed surface forces giving rise to a stress-strain state varying both in the longitudinal and circumferential directions. A membrane shell has only membrane stress resultants and is absolutely flexible in bending. The membrane theory of shells has two important shortcomings limiting the range of applicability of the corresponding equations — firstly, forces prescribed at one edge fully determine the stress resultants in all the cross sections and, secondly, it is impossible to prescribe shell deflection.
