Studies on the seismic buckling design guideline of FBR main vessels. 5. Applicability of the numerical buckling analysis method

Shear-bending buckling, induced through seismic excitation, is one of the most important problems in FBR main vessels. The buckling analysis of thin-walled shell structures has always been a difficult problem due to large discrepancies between buckling loads predicted computationally and those experimentally observed. The purpose of this paper is to describe the computation results and the buckling analysis strategy, based on the results of buckling tests and analyses. Available elements and codes, mesh division, modeling of shape imperfections, material property and other topics are discussed. These investigations show the numerical analysis can be a useful tool for estimating the buckling phenomena. (author)