Collapse of corrugated circular cylinders under uniform external pressure

The paper describes a finite element investigation into the buckling, under uniform external pressure, of four submarine pressure hulls. Two of these hulls were traditional ring-stiffened types, but two of these hulls were in the form of corrugated circular cylinders. The latter design was based on an invention by the present author. The investigation found that the new design was structurally efficient and in the case of the smaller vessel, it was found to be structurally more efficient than the conventional design. Another investigation, based on axisymmetric plastic buckling, was conducted on the two corrugated vessels, to determine if they were prone to collapse through the bellows' mode of failure. This investigation was carried out because former critics of this work stated that the corrugated circular cylinders would fail by the bellows' mode of failure. Neither of the two corrugated pressure hulls was found to fail through the bellows' mode of failure, thereby completely vindicating the present author. The author, however, concludes that the bellows' mode of failure can occur if the cone angles were too large. Two of the finite element theories were based on the author's work, but the giant computer package ANSYS was also used to study non-symmetric bifurcation buckling. This work was carried out to vindicate the author's in-house computer programs, which were simpler to use than ANSYS.