ABSTRACT
Rules for design of structures with respect to buckling have existed for a long time. The stability behavior o f columns and plates is fairly well known among engineers and design methods are available for many of the problems arising in practical applications. Shell buckling has been studied intensively during the last decades and the behavior is now fairly well known. The tendency o f shells to be imperfection sensitive has caused problems in defining a safe design procedure and the code cases developed up till the present time are fairly limited in scope. This fact has also resulted in a reluctance to address other practical problems such as the effect o f local disturbances because "we do not even have sufficient knowledge on how to design shells subjected to uniform loads". Such special problems have so far been left to the designer to solve through for instance testing, rigorous nonlinear analyses or alternative design avoiding the problems.
