Effects of cutouts on the axial buckling strength of steel thin-walled cylindrical shells

Steel cylindrical shells are among common configuration in many industrial structures. For access reasons, cutouts are used in these structures, which can aggravate the buckling susceptibility. Among the different length categories defined in EN 1993–1–6, the medium-length cylindrical shells are prevalent structures. There is little information on the effect of different cutout sizes and boundary conditions on the buckling strength of such structures. Accordingly, this paper presents a numerical finite element (FE) investigation to assess the load-bearing capacity of medium-length shells with cutouts, under axial compressive loads. Some equations are proposed to quantify the results obtained from the verified FE models. In order to examine the applicability of the proposed equations, a set of steel silos was selected as the case study. The results obtained demonstrated that the equations are able to make acceptable predictions. As a complementary study, the effect of adding ring stiffeners around the cutout and including initial imperfections was also assessed.