Collapse analysis of thin walled cylindrical steel shells subjected to constant shear stress

Two principal possibilities for analyzing the structural response of quasi-statically loaded steel shell structures to different actions are available: the commonly used static path tracing and the dynamic analysis with slowly changing loads, i.e. quasi-static loading. However, the failure process of thin-walled shells can often not be traced into the deep post-buckling area with static methods. The current research is focused on a thin-walled circular cylindrical steel shell collapse analysis under constant shear loading. It is shown that it is possible to overcome the difficulties and inconsistencies of the static analysis by using quasi-static analysis. This method allows to distinguish local and global instability points and to determine too the experimentally observed post-buckling strength.