ABSTRACT
Buckling of a thin circular cylindrical shell stiffened by annular plates under the uniform external pressure is studied here. The axisymmetric pre-buckling stress-strain state is estimated as a sum of the membrane stress state and the edge effect. In order to obtain the solution of a buckling problem the same asymptotic method is applied. In the first approximation the couple buckling problem for the cylindrical shell joined with the indentical annular plates is reduced to the eigenvalue problem describing the plate buckling. When the width of the annular plate is sufficiently small, approximate formulas to calculate the critical pressure are obtained. Optimal parameters are evaluated, corresponding to the maximum critical pressure for the stiffened shell with given mass.
