Effects of thickness and modal imperfection amplitude on elastic collapse pressure of a cross-ply imperfect ring

Effects of thickness and modal imperfection amplitude on mode 2 elastic collapse pressures of thin, moderately thick and thick cross-ply perfect and imperfect rings are investigated in detail. A recently developed nonlinear resonance (eigenvalue) based semi-analytical solution technique is employed here for computation of the elastic mode 2 collapse pressures of thin to thick cross-ply rings, weakened by modal or harmonic type imperfections. A von Karman type iterative nonlinear analysis, which is based on the assumptions of transverse inextensibility and first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT), is utilized for computation of hydrostatic collapse pressure of the perfect/imperfect cross-ply ring. Interesting and hitherto unavailable numerical results pertaining to the effects of thickness and amplitude of modal imperfection on the hydrostatic collapse pressures of imperfect cross-ply rings and comparison with their perfect counterparts are also presented.