Thermal buckling of cylindrical shell with temperature-dependent material properties: Conventional theoretical solution and new numerical method

Even though the thermal buckling behavior of shells has been investigated for many years, until now the thermal buckling problem with temperature-dependent material properties still cannot be solved by the existing commercial finite element codes. Therefore, the conventional theoretical solution of the critical temperature rise of cylindrical shell with the temperature-dependent material properties is first derived in this work. Then, an innovative numerical approach is developed by introducing the bisection method and a user subroutine of ANSYS to overcome the shortcoming of existing finite element codes. The results prove that the temperature-dependent material properties have a great negative influence on the ability of the thermal buckling resistance of the cylindrical shell. As a result, the subroutine of ANSYS developed in this work provides a convenient design method for engineers to avoid the complicated theoretical calculation.