THERMAL BUCKLING OF SPHERICAL SHELLS WITH CUT-OUT

In this paper, the thermal buckling of composite shells with selected boundary conditions under uniform and linearly distributed thermal load is investigated. The theoretical modeling procedure is based on semi-analytical finite element method. The effects of important structural parameters such as amount of cut-out at apex, fiber angles as well as temperature distributions are taken into consideration. The obtained results from the present analysis are compared with some available published results to show the accuracy and robustness of the present method.