The effect of variations in the creep exponent on the buckling of circular cylindrical shells

The senior author solved the problem of axially symmetrical creep buckling of thin circular cylindrical shells subjected to uniform axial compression. In that analysis the constitutive equation was a power law, and the exponent was taken to be equal to three. The purpose of this work was to extend the solution to a range of values of the creep exponent, n. To cope with the increasing algebraic complexity, a digital computer was employed in two ways: to generate the set of equations symbolically, and then to solve these equations. The computer programs were used to generate numerical solutions for the cases in which n was equal to 3, 5, 7 and 9. Two simple extrapolation techniques were then employed to obtain approximate solutions to the critical time problem for values of n up to 29.