T-ring stiffened cone cylinder intersection under internal pressure

Cone–cylinder junctions are vastly used in the industries such as oil refineries and aeronautics. They can be seen in pressure vessels and piping such as tanks' roofs and pipes' reducers. When cone–cylinder junctions are subjected to the internal pressure, compression stresses are established near the joining point of the cone to cylinder and make the junction susceptible to non-symmetric buckling failure or axisymmetric failure. As it is practical to increase the shell wall thickness locally near the point of intersection, sometimes it is more convenient to attach a ring-beam exactly to the point of intersection. Only limited work has been done on the T-ring stiffened cone–cylinder junctions under internal pressure. In this study, experimental behavior along with numerical analysis of T-ring stiffened cone–cylinder intersection under internal pressure has been dealt and experimental results such as buckling mode and load are presented here and compared with numerical results. It can be seen that by wise consideration and manipulated use of material properties and geometric imperfections in nonlinear analysis, buckling mode and load resulted from non-linear analysis are compatible with that of experimental results. Two classes of non-linear analyses have been carried out and compared with each other, then it was inferred that even though pattern of geometrical imperfection is effective in determination of buckling modes, but in these kinds of structures it is not necessarily used for the analysis of buckling loads. Finally experimental results were compared with design proposals. It is shown that these proposals can conservatively predict the failure loads.

► Post buckling behavior of T-ring stiffened cone cylinder intersections under internal pressure is stable.
► Buckling load and mode were determined by load-strain plots and Fourier decomposition of ring's displacement, respectively.
► ABAQUS nonlinear solution can exactly predict the buckling behavior of T-ring stiffened cone–cylinder intersections.
► Teng's design proposals can conservatively predict buckling load of TRSCCIs.