Invited Speaker
Prof. Jian Zhang
School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, ChinaSpeech Title: Buckling of Bisegment Pressure Hulls Fabricated Through Free Bulging
Abstract: The present study investigated the buckling performance of bisegment pressure hulls under external pressure. Bisegment pressure hulls were fabricated from bisegment cylindrical preforms by using free bulging. The cylindrical preforms had a nominal thickness of 0.95 mm, nominal radius of 51 mm, and nominal height of 242 mm. Six bisegment pressure hulls were hydrostatically and externally pressurised into buckling. Experimental results revealed that the maximum buckling load of the bisegment pressure hulls was increased by 36.75% compared with that of the bisegment cylinders. And then, the buckling modes of the bisegment pressure hulls were characterised by local pits, whose location was related to the initial geometrical imperfections of the preform and the thickness distribution after free bulging. In addition, the experiments were used to verify the nonlinear finite element analysis to determine the bulging and buckling modes of the hulls. The results showed that the growth rates of the volume and surface area of the bisegment pressure hulls and the reduction rate of the thinnest points of the bisegment pressure hulls increased linearly with the bulging magnitude; by contrast, the radius of the meridian decreased as the bulging magnitude increased. Meanwhile, we noted that the nonlinear analysis results exhibited good agreement with the experimental data.