Buckling under axial compression of long cylindrical shells with random axisymmetric imperfections

Abstract

The buckling of long cylinders with homogeneous random axisymmetric geometric imperfections under uniform axial compression is studied by means of a modified truncated hierarchy technique. It is found that the buckling load of the cylinder depends only on the spectral density of the random imperfections. In particular, for small values of the standard deviation of the axisymmetric imperfection the buckling load depends only on the value of the spectral density at a specific wave number.