Analysis of Ring-Stiffened Cylindrical Shells

Abstract

A new analytical and numerical method is presented for modeling and analysis of cylindrical shells stiffened by circumferential rings. This method treats the shell and ring stiffeners as individual structural components, and considers the ring eccentricity with respect to the shell middle surface. Through use of the distributed transfer functions of the structural components, various static and dynamic problems of stiffened shells are systematically formulated. With this transfer function formulation, the static and dynamic response, natural frequencies and mode shapes, and buckling loads of general stiffened cylindrical shells under arbitrary external excitations and boundary conditions can be determined in exact and closed form. The proposed method is illustrated on a Donnell-Mushtari shell, and compared with finite element method and two other modeling techniques.