Elastic buckling and postbuckling behaviour of widely-stiffened conical shells under axial compression

In thin-walled shells of revolution with widely-spaced meridional stiffeners loaded in compression, a local panel buckling may develop. For the particular case of cylindrical panels, the buckling and postbuckling behaviour has been investigated in detail, whereas limited research is available for the more general case of conical panels. In this paper, the linear and non-linear elastic buckling response of the conical panel is studied for a wide range of shell and stiffening parameters by means of an appropriate finite element model. The classical buckling load is determined on the basis of linear analysis. The imperfection sensitivity is studied through non-linear analysis of imperfect conical panels with imperfections affine to the critical mode. Different aspects of the behaviour are quantified through suitably defined curvature parameters.