Bucking load prediction of sparsely stiffened cylindrical shells via non-destructive probing technique

Stiffened cylindrical shells are widely used in engineering. It is of great significance to effectively predict the ultimate load-bearing capacity of stiffened cylindrical shells. In this paper, the prediction of the buckling strength of the stiffened cylindrical shell based on the non-destructive probing technique was investigated. In particular, the cylindrical shells considered in this work are sparsely stiffened with the featured gap of the stiffeners being much larger than the radius of the prober. The rib heights of the stiffeners are tuned to reveal the applicability of the non-destructive probing technique to the cylindrical shells with different level of reinforcement. The virtual non-destructive probing protocol was modelled and studied using finite element simulations to determine the proper probing location with respect to the stiffener. The real stiffened cylindrical shells were fabricated via additively manufacture and lateral probing experiments were conducted to verify the simulation results. It was found that the height of the stiffener and the probing location are two important factors that affect the accuracy of the buckling load prediction. When the probing location is located at the centroid of the triangle formed by the ribs, the non-destructive probing technique could well predict the buckling strength for the stiffened cylindrical shells with the rib height as high as twice the shell thickness.