Effects of boundary conditions on the stability of cylinders subject to lateral and axial pressures

This paper presents an analysis of critical combinations of uniform external lateral pressure and central axial compressive force for circular cylindrical shells with arbitrarily prescribed boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented for the special case of hydrostatic pressure loading for eight different sets of boundary conditions. The numerical results show that prevention of edge rotation of a generator has little effect on the critical pressure unless the cylinder is very short. On the other hand, it is shown that the presence of axial restraint at the boundaries significantly increases critical pressures for intermediate-length cylinders.