Short-term behaviour of shallow thin-walled concrete dome under uniform external pressure

Thin-walled spherical concrete shells or domes find widespread use in many applications, including in many iconic engineering structures of historical and religious significance. Despite this, very few experimental investigations have been reported in the open literature of shallow spherical concrete domes which allow for the effects of geometric and material non-linearities and of imperfections to be identified. This information is essential, however, in order to validate sophisticated numerical treatments, as well as to calibrate practical design and construction guidelines and is therefore much-needed. This paper reports an experimental study of a shallow thin-walled concrete dome under short-term loading, without the use of reinforcement in the concrete. The dome is 30 mm thick and has a base diameter of 3 m, being supported on a steel ring beam. The testing of the dome to failure under a uniform external pressure is described in the paper, and it is shown that it failed in a non-axisymmetric buckling mode well before the concrete reached its compressive strength. The failure pressure is compared with the ‘theoretical’ buckling results and the analytical results based on finite element analyses. In particular, this paper presents a comprehensive set of experimental data for the load–displacement and load–strain relationships and their distributions across the spherical dome throughout the loading regime.