Theory of thick-walled shells and its application to cylindrical shell (Q1209029)

The authors treat the problem of the linear analysis of thick-walled shells by means of a Taylor expansion of the unknowns with respect to the normal coordinate. The mixed variational principle of Hellinger-Reissner is initially used in three dimensions (3-D), where stresses and displacements are expanded in a consistent way, the latter up to the third order for the tangential components and to the second order for the normal ones. An integration along the normal of the 3-D stresses provides all the surface stresses in terms of the generalized coefficients of the expansion. Then, the mixed principle easily gives the constitutive equations, the equilibrium equations and the boundary conditions in terms of the generalized parameters of the Taylor series. The formulae are unavoidedly complicated. The method of solution remains finally the displacement method using the generalized displacement parameters. Application is proposed for a thick cylindrical shell where displacements and boundary conditions are developed in Fourier series. (Euler's method of undetermined exponential is proposed in the general case.) Photo- elastic tests allow to verify the numerical results which fit rather well with the experimental ones. Let us notice that this method is nowadays adopted for the analysis of multilayered composite shells made of piecewise anisotropic layers, and even in the geometrically nonlinear case where the finite element method is more appropriate for arbitrary geometries.