Critical load of a bilayered orthotropic elastic–plastic conical shell with the change of the shell basic surface location

The paper presents the derivation of stability equations and the comparison of critical loads for an orthotropic elastic–plastic conical shell with proper location of the shell basic surface. Prandtl–Reuss plastic flow theory is accepted in the analysis. To derive the stability equations the variational method was accepted and Ritz method was used to solve the equations. Numerical results were obtained by the use of a special iterative algorithm of the elastic–plastic analysis implemented on the PC.