Bending Experiments on Thin Cylindrical Shells

Cylindrical shell structures are highly susceptible to buckling phenomena when they experience compressive stress. In fact, there are few experimental researches that give the real behavior of a cylindrical shell submitted to pure bending, especially thin shells. This is due to the difficulty of pure bending applying to such thin shells and that such structures behavior under bending is frequently considered rather similar to pure compression. This chapter describes an experimental investigation of a procedure including a system for applying pure bending to cylindrical shells with radius to thickness ratio equals 155. The instrumentation consists of a new loading system in which the pure bending is applied using concentrated loads at the ends of the test model. Ultimately, the critical values for moments as well as buckling modes were compared with finite element (FE) results.