Buckling behavior of ring-stiffened cylinder shells under axial pressure - Part 1:Tests and geometric imperfection analysis

ABSTR ACT Modern tanks and silos are often constructed as ring-stiffened circular cylinder shells. Until now, the load-in-creasing effect of closely positioned ring stiffeners under axial pressure has received limited attention in research. As the cur-rent design standards do not include relevant content, steel containers have not played well to achieve better sustainability due to unnecessary high material consumption. Through expe-riments and numerical simulations, the influence of ring stiffe-ners on the axial buckling behavior of circular cylinder shells is presented based on the latest research results. The results showed that ring stiffened circular cylinders followed by the current design practice are not economical under axial com-pression. In part 1 of this paper, reduced-scale tests are first conducted to investigate the influence of ring stiffeners on the buckling behavior of circular cylinder shells under axial pressure. The comparison of test results shows that the load-bearing capaci-ty of ring-stiffened shells is several times higher than that of unstiffened shells. The geometric imperfections of the test spe-cimen are measured by 3-D scanning technology and then analyzed using the Fourier series method. In part 2, an engi-neering model is derived based on numerical simulations.