NASTRAN buckling analysis of a thin walled cylinder.pdf

NASTRAN BUCKLING ANALYSIS O F A THIN-WALLED CYLINDER By Ralph B. Wight NASA Goddard Space Flight Center SUMMARY The computer runtime required for a buckling analysis using NASTRAN is consid- erably greater than for a linear static analysis of the same structure. For this reason it is very important to obtain an optimal model size for the structure being analyzed, such that the model is neither so large as to increase running time unnecessarily, nor so small as to hinder accuracy. This paper studies the problem of critical load accuracy versus model complexity for a thin walled cylinder, using both Level 1 2 and Level 15 NASTRAN releases. INTRODUCTION Buckling is generally the failure mode for thin-walled shells carrying axially com- pressive loads and NASTRAN has the capability of solving for the critical load of such problems. The problem which initially stimulated interest in this study was the buckling analysis of a thin,walled cone to be used on a NASA spacecraft. NASTRAN analysis yielded a wide range of answers by varying the finite element model used. No analytical solutions could be found for buckling of a cone which could be used to verify the NASTRAN results. Therefore the buckling analysis of a thin-walled cylinder of approximately the same dimen- sions as the Sone was performed to determine the model complexity needed to obtain good agreement between NASTRAN and analytical solutions. The cylinder analyzed is 78.12 cm in diameter by 55.88 cm long with a wall thickness of 0.102 cm. There have been complaints about the crudeness of the NASTRAN plats element for buckling analysis. (See, for example, ref. 1.) The majority of the runs made for this study used NASTRAN Level 1