The paper describes experimental tests carried out on three ring-stiffened circular conical shells that
suffered plastic general instability under uniform external pressure. The cones were carefully
machined from EN1A mild steel to a very high degree of precision. The end diameters of the cones,
together with their thicknesses were the same, but the size of their ring stiffeners was different for
each of the three vessels. In the general instability mode of collapse, the entire ring-shell
combination buckles bodily in its flank.
The paper also provides three design charts using the results obtained from these three vessels,
together with the results obtained for twelve other vessels from other tests. All 15 vessels failed by
general instability. One of these design charts was based on conical shell theory and two of the
design charts were based on the general instability of ring-stiffened circular cylindrical shells, using
Kendrick’s theory, which were made equivalent to ring-stiffened circular conical shells suffering
from general instability under uniform external pressure. The design charts allowed the possibility
of obtaining plastic knockdown factors, so that the theoretical elastic buckling pressures, for perfect
vessels, could be divided by the appropriate plastic knockdown factor, to give the predicted
buckling pressure. The theoretical work is based on the solutions of Kendrick, together with the
finite element program of Ross, namely RCONEBUR and the commercial finite element package
ANSYS. This method can also be used for the design of full-scale vessels.
Plastic General Instability of Ring-Stiffened Conical Shells under External Pressure
