Plastic buckling of eccentrically stiffened circular cylindrical shells.

A solution for the plastic buckling of eccentrically stiffened cylinders is derived by use of the J2 deformation theory of plasticity for a set of simply supported edge boundary conditions. The uniaxial character of the stiffeners and the stiffener eccentricity (asymmetry about the cylinder middle surface) are explicitly accounted for as is a variable Poisson's ratio in the plastic region. A closed-form stability criterion is obtained for axial compression, lateral pressure, and hydrostatic pressure loadings. The present results are more realistic for most practical stiffened cylinders than an existing solution in which an orthotropic shell model is used. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effect of plastic action on the buckling load of a typical aerospace structure.