Stability of anisotropic shells of revolution of positive or negative Gaussian curvature

A mixed variational principle is derived by Hamilton’s method from the principle of minimum potential energy for thin anisotropic shells of revolution and is then used to derive a normal system of equations with complex coefficients. Discrete orthogonalization is used to solve this homogeneous system and the nonlinear system of equations that describes the precritical state of shells. A shell generated by revolving a circular arc around the axis parallel to its chord is analyzed for stability. The solution is compared with the approximate solution obtained assuming that the precritical state is membrane. It is established that the approximate problem formulation gives incorrect results for shells of negative Gaussian curvature