The toroidal shell is a special type of shells of revolution, which is hardly solved by analytical method. To show the nonlinear structural characteristics of a circular toroidal shell with ring-stiffened ribs due to external pressure, both material nonlinear and geometric nonlinear Finite Element Analyses (FEA) have been presented in this paper, especially for the stability to the type of pressure hull. In the presented Finite Element Method (FEM), the elastic-plastic stress-strain relations have been adopted, and the initial deflection of toroidal shell created by manufacture was also taken into account. The analytic results eventually indicate that by nonlinear FEA such a new type of ring-stiffened circular toroidal shell could be used to a main pressure hull as the traditional ring-stiffened circular cylindrical shell, which could obtain kinds of performance in underwater engineering, such as better stability and more reserve buoyancy to the classical ring-stiffened cylindrical shell.
Creep buckling analysis of a circular cylindrical shell under both axial compression and internal or external pressure.