NONLINEAR STABILITY OF SINUSOIDAL VELAROIDAL SHELL

The nonlinear analysis of thin-walled shells is not a rarity, particularly the nonlinear strength one. Many works are devoted to linear and nonlinear analyses of shells of classical form: cylindrical, spherical, hemispherical, shallow, conical. The concept of shells of complex geometry appears when the coefficients of the first and second quadratic forms of their middle surfaces are functions of the curvilinear coordinates. Concerning nonlinearity, it is generally accepted that four different sources of nonlinearity exist in solid mechanics: the geometric nonlinearity, the material nonlinearity and the kinetic nonlinearity. The above theoretical aspect of the nonlinearity, applied to a sinusoidal velaroidal shell with the inner radius r0=1m, the outer radius R=20m and the number of waves n= 8, will give rise to the investigation of its nonlinear buckling resistance. The building material is a concrete. The investigation emphasizes more on the material and the geometric nonlinearities, which are more closed to the reality. Finite element model of the shell consists of 6400 elements and 3280 nodes, the total number of nodal unknown - 18991. For surface modelling was used flat shell elements with six degrees of freedom in the node. The boundary conditions cor- respond to hinged bearing on the outer and inner contours. The result of the investigation is the buckling force of the shell under self-weight and uniformly vertically distributed load on its area, the corresponding numerical values of displacements and the buckling mode