Fibre-based modelling for predicting the progressive collapse of cylindrical shells under combined axial compression and bending moment

Cylindrical shell is a fundamental building block of many engineering structures. They are usually designed to be the primary load-carrying components to withstand different combinations of environmental loads. This paper presents a fibre-based approach to modelling the progressive collapse of cylindrical shells under combined axial compression and bending moment. In this method, the progressive collapse behaviour of cylindrical shells is incrementally evaluated by accounting for the local response of each fibre element. This approach offers a computationally efficient and robust scheme to compute the ultimate strength of cylindrical shells. Moreover, it enables the modelling of load-shedding between the buckled and intact shell elements on the compressive side, and the yielding failure on the tensile side, which appears to be ignored in existing design codes. Analyses are performed on cylindrical shells with a wide range of design parameters. Validation using the finite element method demonstrates a reasonably well performance of the proposed fibre-based modelling technique.