Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Dynamic Buckling of a Composite Truncated Conical Shell Under External Loading

Composite conical shells have extensive industrial application and stability analysis is necessary for them. In this article, stability of composite conical shells subjected to dynamic external pressure is investigated by numerical and experimental methods. In experimental tests, cross-ply glass woven fabrics were selected for manufacturing of specimens. Hand-layup method was employed for fabricating the glass-epoxy composite shells. A test-setup that includes pressure vessel and data acquisition system was designed. For detecting the buckling load, pressure history of vessel during loading was used. Because of suddenly changing in volume of pressure vessel in instability moment, a disruption in pressure history can be observable. Also, numerical analyses are performed in Abaqus software. For doing this at a distinct loading time, we load composite cone with dynamic external loading and then draw displacement of a specific node versus time. And then with continuous changing of loads and drawing it versus time, the load on which variation of displacement become significant has been considered as dynamic buckling load.
In both of experiments and numerical studies, increasing of shell’s stability threshold in dynamic loading is recognizable. Finally, results are compared together while a good correlation is observed.