VIBRATION AND ELASTIC INSTABILITY OF THIN-WALLED CONICAL SHELLS UNDER EXTERNAL-PRESSURE

A thin-walled truncated conical shell element is presented for the vibration and elastic instability of conical shells under uniform external pressure. This theoretical analysis is an extension of previous work carried out by the author, where for the two cases presented in this report, cubic and quadratic variations are assumed in the meridional direction, for the meridional and tangential displacements. In the previous study, only linear variations were assumed in this direction, for these displacements. Comparisons between these three cases for buckling pressures and resonant frequencies show the differences to be small for circular cylinders and cones of both small and large apical angle.