Elastic buckling of thin-walled circular tubes containing an elastic infill

Circular thin-walled elastic tubes under concentric axial loading usually fail by shell buckling, and in practical design procedures the buckling load can be determined by modifying the local buckling stress to account empirically for the imperfection sensitive response that is typical in Donnell shell theory. While the local buckling stress of a hollow thin-walled tube under concentric axial compression has a solution in closed form, that of a thin-walled circular tube with an elastic infill, which restrains the local buckling mode, has received far less attention. This paper addresses the local buckling of a tubular member subjected to axial compression, and formulates an energy-based technique for determining the local buckling stress as a function of the stiffness of the elastic infill by recourse to a transcendental equation. This simple energy formulation, with one degree of buckling freedom, shows that the elastic local buckling stress increases from I to root 3 times that of a hollow tube as the stiffness of the elastic infill increases from zero to infinity; the latter case being typical of that of a concrete-filled steel tube. The energy formulation is then recast into a multi-degree of freedom matrix stiffness format, in which the function for the buckling mode is a Fourier representation satisfying, a priori, the necessary kinematic condition that the buckling deformation vanishes at the point where it enters the elastic medium. The solution is shown to converge rapidly, and demonstrates that the simple transcendental formulation provides a sufficiently accurate representation of the buckling problem.