Design and optimization of laminated conical shells for buckling

The exact buckling load is calculated by means of the computer code STAGS-A (Structural Analysis of General Shells[Almroth BO, Brogan FA, Meller E, Zele F, Petersen HT. Collapse analysis for shells of general shape, user's manual for STAGS-A computer code. Technical report AFFDL TR-71-8; 1973]) by adding a user written subroutine WALL, see Ref. [Goldfeld Y, Arbocz J. Buckling of laminated conical shells taking into account the variations of the stiffness coefficients. AIAA J 2004; 42(3):642-649]. The optimization problem is solved using response surface methodology.