Cylindrical shells under axial compression are susceptible to buckling and hence require the development of enhanced underlying mathematical models in order to accurately predict the buckling load. Imperfections of the geometry of the cylinders may cause a drastic decrease of the buckling load and give rise to the need of advanced techniques in order to consider these imperfections in a buckling analysis. A deterministic buckling analysis is based on the use of the so-called knockdown factors, which specifies the reduction of the buckling load of the perfect shell in order to account for the inherent uncertainties in the geometry. In this paper, it is shown that these knockdown factors are overly conservative and that the fields of probability and statistics provide a mathematical vehicle for realistically modeling the imperfections. Furthermore, the influence of different types of imperfection on the buckling load are examined and validated with experimental results.
