Modeling elastic-plastic buckling of sandwich axisymmetric shells: on the limits of "shell" models and analytical solutions

Background: The objective of this paper is to answer the question: "Can a 'shell' model always be used to predict the elastic buckling of a shell?" Method: This paper shows that such a model leads to significantly overestimated critical loads in the case of sandwich shells and gives an explanation for this overestimation. Results: A dependable model is proposed and applied to a few structures of revolution, for which it is shown that shell analyses are sometimes overly on the unsafe side. Conclusion: Of course, in such cases, 3D analysis is possible, but the associated computation cost is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the Fourier series analysis proposed in this paper. © 2014, Combescure; licensee Springer.