Buckling of Composite Cylindrical Shells with Circular Cutouts

Cylindrical shells are common structural elements in the aerospace sector due to their high load-carrying capacity per unit weight. Cutouts may, however, significantly reduce this load-carrying capacity, especially when cylindrical shells buckle under axial compression. Since the buckling load is often a crucial design parameter, it is important to predict this value efficiently. Hence, a procedure to rapidly calculate the linear buckling load of axially compressed quasi-isotropic composite cylindrical shells with circular cutouts was derived. After minimizing the total potential energy of the structure with the Ritz method, the buckling loads were obtained as the solutions to an eigenvalue problem. Comparing these predictions with the results from linear and nonlinear finite element analyses shows that the analytical buckling loads follow the general trends of the numerical solutions and are calculated orders of magnitude faster. This makes the approach suitable for preliminary design where many design permutations must be evaluated in a short period of time.