Abstract:

By taking into consideration the prebuckling effects, this paper investigates the buckling of imperfect functionally graded cylindrical shells under lateral pressure by using the Donnell theory of circular cylindrical shells and the prebuckling consistent theory, presents the corresponding critical buckling conditions with the aid of Galerkin method, and reveals the effect of an uniform temperature rise on the buckling by considering the temperature-dependent material properties. Numerical results show that （ 1 ） the critical load of functionally graded cylindrical shells is greatly affected by the structure size, i. e. , it greatly increases with the decrease of the length-to-radius raio as well as with the increase of the thickness-to radius ratio; and （2） the critical load increases with the volume fraction of ceramic constituent but decreases with the increase of the defect amplitude or the temperature rise of the surroundings. Thermal analysis also shows that, within a certain temperature range, the critical load of ceramic-rich shells is slightly affected by the temperature rise.

Key words: functionally graded material, cylindrical shell, defect, lateral pressure, buckling