Elastic buckling of barrelled shell under external pressure

The aim of the paper is to present a procedure for design of a family of shells of revolution of constant mass and, as a next step, of constant volume. As a reference a cylindrical shell is taken into consideration. By decreasing the value of the meridional radius of curvature R1R1, which for cylindrical shell equals infinity, barrelled shells are created up to the spherical shell for which both meridional and circumferential radii of curvature are equal (R1=R2R1=R2). A numerical example of using the presented procedure is considered. Then for the family of shells of revolution of constant mass a buckling analysis using FEM method is carried out. Results of the analysis show the relationship between the radius of curvature of the shell R1R1 and the critical load pcrpcr in the case of uniform external pressure.