Elastoplastic buckling and collapse of spherical shells under combined loadings

In this paper, the buckling behavior of a complete spherical shell under external pressure and of a half-sphere under torsion are first investigated. Several parametric studies are performed, which rely on the European Recommendations framework (ECCS text), so as to identify the different key parameters of the corresponding buckling capacity curves and lead up to both a qualitative and quantitative discussion about the imperfection sensitivity of such structures under each fundamental load. The related results allow us to completely describe the buckling behavior of a spherical shell under combined external pressure and circumferential shear by means of interactive buckling curves, without the need of many supplementary computations for any arbitrary combined loading case.