A Comparative Experimental and Numerical Study on Buckling Behavior of Composite Lattice Cylinders

In this study, the buckling behavior of three samples of composite lattice cylinders made of Carbon/Epoxy, Glass/Epoxy, and Aramid/Epoxy materials manufactured by wet filament winding method under axial compressive loading has been investigated numerically and experimentally. In the numerical simulation, linear eigenvalue buckling analysis is achieved using ABAQUS software. Effect of four element types including quadratic beam element B32, conventional shell element S8R, continuum shell element SC8R, and solid element C3D20R on the buckling load, buckling mode shape and solution CPU-run-time are investigated. Comparison between the experimental test results and numerical results indicates that the most accurate element is C3D20R, while the most rapid and cost-effective element is S8R. Also, it is shown that the beam element B32 is not reliable enough for predicting buckling mode shape and buckling load. The experimental results show that local crippling of the helical ribs followed by delamination at the ribs’ intersection (nodes) is the predominant failure mode in all the composite samples.