Marguerre shell type secant matrices for the postbuckling analysis of thin, shallow composite shells

The postbuckling behaviour of thin shells has fascinated researchers because the theoretical prediction and their experimental verification are often different. In reality, shell panels possess small imperfections and these can cause large reduction in static buckling strength. This is more relevant in thin laminated composite shells. To study the postbuckling behaviour of thin, imperfect laminated composite shells using finite elements, explicit incremental or secant matrices have been presented in this paper. These incremental matrices which are derived using Marguerre's shallow shell theory can be used in combination with any thin plate/shell finite element (Classical Laminated Plate Theory - CLPT) and can be easily extended to the First Order Shear deformation Theory (POST). The advantage of the present formulation is that it involves no numerical approximation in forming total potential energy of the shell during large deformations as opposed to earlier approximate formulations published in the literature. The initial imperfection in shells could be modeled by simply adjusting the ordinale of the shell forms, The present formulation is very easy to implement in any existing finite element codes. The secant matrices presented in this paper are shown to be very accurate in tracing the postbuckling behaviour of thin isotropic and laminated composite shells with general initial imperfections.