Plastic axisymmetric buckling of thin-walled circular cylinders under uniform external pressure

The paper presents two theoretical investigations and an experimental investigation into the plastic axisymmetric collapse of three machined circular cylinders under uniform external pressure. One of the theoretical methods was based on an approximate semi-empirical method for plastic shell instability, while the other was based on a finite element solution involving both material and geometrical non-linearity. Comparisons between the two theories and experiment were quite good, and appeared to show that there may be a connection between plastic shell instability and plastic axisymmetric deformation.