Experimental and numerical examination of the effect of geometrical imperfection on buckling load in axially compressed composites cylinder with and without cutout

When a cylindrical shell subject to a compressive load, because of various imperfections happened during processes as manufacturing, handling, assembling and machining, buckling occurs in loads lower than corresponding static failure load. Still many of cylindrical shell structures are designed against buckling based on experimental data introduced by NASA SP-8007 as conservative lower bound curves. In the manuscript, non-linear methods of Modified Linear Buckling Modeshape Imperfections (M-LBMI) and Simple Perturbation Load Imperfections (SPLI) for composite cylindrical shell with and without cutout are investigated. In order to evaluate the numerical results composite cylinder with stacking sequence of [90/�23/90] are manufactured by using filament winding method and buckling tests are performed under axial loading. Non-linear numerical results in cylinder with and without cutout are close together and have good agreement with experimental data. . It was concluded that buckling load predicted by SPLI and modified LBMI method on cylinder with cutout is close to result of case without apply geometric imperfections. In summary, it was concluded that cutout on the cylinder body act as an imperfection to trigger buckling of the structures so there is no need to apply geometrical imperfections.