Abstract

Stiffened cylinder is widely used in launch vehicle structures because its stiffener can prevent buckling wave to spread in the skin. However, it is still sensitive to shape imperfection more or less. Knockdown factors of stiffened cylinders have been researched all the time. However, comparison among different grid types is seldom. In this paper, both orthogrid stiffened cylinder and isogrid stiffened cylinder under axial compression are studied. Linear eigenvalue method and nonlinear implicit method are adopted to calculate the bearing capacities of the cylinders with ABAQUS. The sinusoidal function is used to model the imperfection. Given different imperfection parameters, the sensitive of bearing capacities to the shape imperfection is researched for two kinds of cylinders. Axial compression experiments are also implemented for the stiffened cylinders, and the results agree with numerical result. Knockdown factor of orthogrid cylinder is about 0.5~0.7. Meanwhile, it proves that when the stiffener is strong enough, the effects of shape imperfection on load capacity can be ignored for orthotropic grid, and its knockdown factor is nearly 1.