Ultimate Strength Analysis of Ring-stiffened Cylinders Using Commercial softwares (I)

상용소프트웨어를 이용한 원환보강 원통의 최종강도 해석(I)

Despite the increasing necessity of accurate estimation of ring-stiffened cylinders'ultimate strength, the complex structural behavior of cylinders has made their design mainly depend on empirical formulas mostly based on limited test data rather than theoretical background. This paper has developed the imperfection method which enables the ultimate strength analysis of buckling-sensitive structures by combining two separate functions covered by common commercial finite element softwares, which are linear elastic buckling analysis and nonlinear stress analysis. Developed method was applied to two of the world most renowned softwares, MSC/NASTRAN and ABAQUS, for the analysis of ring-stiffened cylinders and unexpectedly big difference in their analysis results was found. This tells that many widely used commercial softwares have their different strong points and weak points and the choice of commercial software should be cautiously made after thorough inspection. This paper ends with some useful information about which of the two aforementioned softwares is more respectively for the linear elastic buckling analysis and the ultimate strength analysis of ring-stiffened cylinders.