Admissible boundary conditions and solutions to internally pressurized thin arbitrarily laminated cylindrical shell boundary-value problems

Admissible boundary conditions are derived for an arbitrarily laminated internally pressurized cylindrical shell of finite length, under the framework of Donnell's, Love-Timoshenko's and Sanders' kinematic relations, and the CLT (based on Love's first approximation theory). Closed-form solutions for the same cylindrical shell are presented for Love-Timoshenko's theory, with two sets of asymmetrically placed prescribed boundary conditions. As the first example, internally pressurized thin hybrid general (asymmetric) four-layer cylindrical shells with RS2-C4 boundary conditions, made of glass and carbon fiber reinforced composite layers, are numerically investigated. In the second example, the numerical results for two-layer asymmetrically laminated cylindrical shells, with RS2-SS1 boundary conditions, are compared with those, computed using triangular finite elements based on the layer-wise constant shear-angle theory (LCST), in order to evaluate the limit of applicability of the CLT. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.