A General Formulation of Stress Distribution in Cylinders Subjected to Non-Uniform External Pressure

This work presents a two-dimensional stress analysis for elastic solid cylinders subjected to combined loading. The loading is generally formed with a number of concentrated and partially distributed forces all applied radially on the outer surface. The distributed forces cause pressures with non-uniform intensity along the circumferential direction. The cylinder is assumed to be long so that a state of plane-strain is valid. To obtain the stress distribution for the problem of partially distributed forces a new approach is followed first introduced in this paper. It is based on the expressions formed after using the theory of simple radial stress distribution when point-forces are applied on the cylinder and leads to the solution after direct integration. The total stresses due to both concentrated and distributed forces are obtained using the method of superposition. Apart from its simplified formulation, this general solution is always preferable since it proved to have a great advantage. As a result of not containing Fourier series, it eliminates some problems of convergence of the series at the boundaries that appear due to the Gibbs phenomena when the boundary conditions are a discontinuous function. Numerical results are presented for some interesting cases of loading conditions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.