Imperfection sensitivity is essential for mechanical behaviour of biopolymer shells characterized by high geometric heterogeneity. The present work studies initial post-buckling and imperfection sensitivity of a pressured biopolymer spherical shell based on non-axisymmetric buckling modes and associated mode interaction. Our results indicate that for biopolymer spherical shells with moderate radius-to-thickness ratio (say, less than 30) and smaller effective bending thickness (say, less than 0.2 times average shell thickness), the imperfection sensitivity predicted based on the axisymmetric mode without the mode interaction is close to the present results based on non-axisymmetric modes with the mode interaction with a small (typically, less than 10%) relative errors. However, for biopolymer spherical shells with larger effective bending thickness, the maximum load an imperfect shell can sustain predicted by the present non-axisymmetric analysis can be significantly (typically, around 30%) lower than those predicted based on the axisymmetric mode without the mode interaction. In such cases, a more accurate non-axisymmetric analysis with the mode interaction, as given in the present work, is required for imperfection sensitivity of pressured buckling of biopolymer spherical shells. Finally, the implications of the present study to two specific types of biopolymer spherical shells (viral capsids and ultrasound contrast agents) are discussed.
Buckling of spherical shells revisited