ABSTRACT
Analytical, numerical and experimental research on the buckling of cylindrical shells has been performed in the last decades (e.g. Morandi 1994) and the prediction of collapse loads under external pressure has shown some discrepancies with the experimental results. This is explained by the fact that it is difficult to accurately reproduce the experiments, such as the boundary conditions, loads, or imperfections due to manufacturing (Grognec 2009). The factors that mainly affect the buckling of cylindrical shells under external pressure, besides the geometric and material properties, are geometric imperfections, residual stresses and yield anisotropy (Graham 2008).
