Nonlinear approach on torsional buckling and postbuckling of functionally graded cylindrical shells reinforced by orthogonal and spiral stiffeners in thermal environment

A new nonlinear approach on the buckling and postbuckling of functionally graded orthogonal and/or spiral-stiffened circular cylindrical shells subjected to torsional loads is proposed in this paper. The shells skin are stiffened by eccentrically rings, stringers, and/or spiral stiffeners at the surface of shells assuming that the material distribution laws of shell skin and stiffeners are graded by two distribution models. Lekhnitskii’s smeared stiffeners technique is improved for spiral stiffeners with effect of thermal terms. This is the significant novelty and scientific contribution of this paper. Theoretical formulations were established by using the Donnell shell theory taking into account the geometrical nonlinearity of von Kármán. The obtained results investigated in numerical forms show effects of volume fraction exponent of shell skin and stiffeners, geometrical parameter and stiffeners on the torsional buckling, and postbuckling behavior of functionally graded cylindrical shells. Especially, very large effects of spiral stiffeners on torsional stability behavior are obtained in comparison with same quantity material of orthogonal stiffeners.