The Buckling Of Cylindrical Shell Under Transverse Load And Laser Irradiation

It is in researchers' great interest to study the response of pre-loaded structures irradiated by CW laser beam. For most materials, their mechanical characteristics depend on temperature intensively, and the characteristic values in high temperature are lower than those in normal temperature. When materials are irradiated by laser beam, they will be heated and as a result, softened, which may lead to the unstabilization of the pre-loaded structures in some situation. In this paper, the buckling response of the cylindrical aluminum alloy shells subjected to transverse load with or without laser beam irradiation is studied. The conclusions are as follows.(l)Experiments are carried out to study the buckling response of cylindrical aluminum alloy shells under transverse load, with critical buckling loads measured and buckling configurations recorded. Physical model is built, and finite element program ANSYS is used to simulate the buckling response. It is found that the stimulation results are basically consistent with the experimental results, which means that our physical model is applicable and ANSYS can be used to simulate this kind of problems.(2)Using ANSYS, the buckling of cylindrical shells subjected to laser irradiation together with transverse load is studied. The laser power absorbed by the shell is treated as equivalent heat flux. The relationship between the critical buckling load and laser power density is studied, and it is found that the critical buckling load decreases quadratically when the incident laser power density increases. The relationship between the critical buckling load and the laser beam diameter is also studied under the condition that the total incident laser energy remains unchanged, and a conclusion is reached that the critical buckling load has a minimum corresponding to a certain diameter of the laser beam.