ABSTRACT
Ring-stiffened cylindrical shells are extensively used in engineering applications such as tanks, silos, pressure vessels, submarine hulls, aircraft fuselages, and pipelines for conveying fluids or gases. The attachment of ring stiffeners on the shell wall allows increasing the buckling resistance or distributing the local loads in the circumferential direction. However, the generation of efficient and user-friendly design rules is not an easy task because of various possible failure modes of these shell structures: (i) local buckling in the shell wall between ring stiffeners, (ii) overall buckling of the whole shell structure, including ring stiffeners, and (iii) local failure of ring stiffeners. In the presented paper, theoretical and experimental results from literature are discussed, and new results from computational analyses are presented regarding the imperfection sensitivity of ring-stiffened cylindrical shells under uniform external pressure. Based on the results, the most detrimental imperfection pattern is identified for future numerical investigations.
