Ultimate strength analysis of ring-stiffened cylinders with initial imperfections

This paper has developed an efficient nonlinear finite element method that covers both initial deformations and initial stresses of general distribution in calculating the ultimate strength of ring-stiffened cylinders. The developed method and two world-widely used commercial codes(NASTRAN and ABAQUS) were simultaneously applied to the same analysis model within the extent those commercial codes can cover, to check the validity of the present method. After the validity check, it was used for parametric studies for more general case of initial stress distribution, which drew some useful information about the imperfection sensitivity of the ultimate strength of ring-stiffened cylinders.