Some Orthotropic Shells with Bending Suppressed

In order that membrane theory can be applied with bending stresses completely suppressed, the shell configuration should be adjusted. Previous studies have been concerned with isotropic toroidal type shells under internal pressure only or under axial load only. Thickness variations were obtained for predetermined geometries. Also, the variation of elastic parameters for ellipsoidal type bulkheads was proposed in order to suppress bending. However, the inherent drawback of this latter approach is that the fabrication of such materials may not always be feasible. In this paper, shell configurations are obtained for orthotropic toroidal type shells with axial load only and for orthotropic shells with axial load and internal pressure. An axisymmetric problem is considered with the axes of orthotropy coinciding with the meridional and circumferential directions. The effect of orthotropy on the Gaussian curvature of the shell is presented. The relative importance of the axial load to the internal pressure ratio is also studied.