Buckling of Thin-walled Cylinder Shell Specimens with Cut-out Imperfections

In present paper, the effects of imperfections on the buckling behaviours of aluminium cylindrical shells under compression are investigated by experimental and numerical methods. The imperfections are produced by one or two circular cut-out on the shell surface. The configuration of specimens is fabricated by the geometric parameter, which is calculated from the circular cutout radius a, thickness t, and cylinder radius R. Recently, a lot of numerical analysis have been carried out by using cylindrical shell with imperfections. However, there are a few experimental substantiations. Further more, the combined effect of two circular cut-out on the buckling load of cylindrical shell is not treated from experiment point of view. In this experiment, Digital Image Correlation Method (DICM) was used to obtained 3D displacement and strain data of the specimens during the test. The numerical simulations are also calculated. They are also compared with numerical results from the literature. In this study, the difference between them and the effects of parameter on the buckling load of specimens are also discussed in this paper. It is shown that the experimental and FE analytical results combine well. Moreover, the effects of imperfections found to be sensitive to the buckling load of specimens.