Modelling of Random Geometrical Imperfections and Reliability Calculations for Thin Cylindrical Shell Subjected to Lateral Pressure

It is well known that it is very difficult to manufacture perfect thin cylindrical shell. Initial geometrical imperfections existing in the shell structure is one of the main determining factor for load bearing capacity of thin cylindrical shell under uniform lateral pressure. As these imperfections are random, the strength of same size cylindrical shell will also random and a statistical method can be preferred to find the allowable load of these shell structures and therefore a In this work the cylindrical shell of size R/t = 228, L/R = 2 and t=1mm is taken for study. The random geometrical imperfections are modeled by linearly adding the first 10 eigen mode shapes using 2kfullfactorial design matrix of DoE. By adopting this method 1024 FE random imperfect cylindrical shell models are generated with tolerance limit of ± 1 mm. Nonlinear static FE analysis of ANSYS is used to find the buckling strength of these 1024 models. FE results of 1024 models are used to predict the reliability based on MVFOSM method.