Postbuckling of Moderately Thick Imperfect Rings under External Pressure

A fully nonlinear finite-element analysis for postbuckling response of a moderately thick imperfect ring under applied hydrostatic pressure is presented. The fully nonlinear theory employed here, in contrast to the von Karman approximation generally prevalent in the existing literature, for a moderately thick ring does not, on employment of the conventional Love–Kirchhoff hypothesis (originally developed for the small deflection regime), automatically guarantee vanishing of the transverse normal and shear strains in the large deflection regime. A curved six-node element, based on an assumed quadratic displacement field (in the circumferential coordinate), employs a two-dimensional hypothesis, known as linear displacement distribution through thickness theory, to capture the effect of the transverse shear/normal (especially, shear) deformation behavior. Numerical results show that even for a sufficiently thin ring, the conventional nonlinear theory, based on von Karman approximation, produces an error on the order of 10%.