Ultimate Strength Analysis of Ring-stiffened Cylinders with Initial Imperfections(I)

This paper has developed an efficient nonlinear finite element method that covers both initial deformations and initial stresses of general distribution in calculating the ultimate strength of ring-stiffened cylinders. The developed method and two widely-used commercial codes (NASTRAN and ABAQUS) were simultaneously applied to the same analysis model within the extent of those commercial codes' coverage to check the validity of the present method. After the validity check, it was used for parametric studies for more general cases of initial stress distribution, which produced some useful information about the imperfection sensitivity of the ultimate strength of ring-stiffened cylinders.