A Study on the Buckling Characteristics of Conical Shell Using Differential Quadrature Method

In this paper, the buckling analysis of conical shell under transverse pressure or axial compression is studied using the Differential Quadrature Method (DQM) for various boundary conditions. Based on the Donnell theory of shell, the equilibrium equations are obtained using Hamilton’s principle. The adjacent equilibrium criterion is employed to defining the stability equations of conical shell subjected to lateral pressure and axial compression. Then the stability equations are solved numerically using DQM and employing the concept of extra degrees of freedom. The acquired results in special cases are compared with the results in literature for the accuracy evaluation of the method and a good agreement can be seen. The non-dimensional critical buckling loads are tabulated for different vertex angles, some thickness-radius ratios and various combinations of boundary conditions. Also, the effects of the vertex angle, boundary conditions, length-radius ratio and thickness-length ratio on the buckling behavior of the conical shell are investigated in details.