Buckling and layer failure of composite laminated cylinders subjected to hydrostatic pressure

Abstract The buckling and layer failure characteristics of composite laminated cylinders subjected to hydrostatic pressure were investigated through finite element analysis for underwater vehicle application. The Tsai-Wu failure criteria were used as the failure criteria for the buckling analysis. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to research the influence of the number of elements on the critical buckling pressure. ANSYS, a finite element program, successfully predicted the buckling pressure with 5.3–27.8% (linear) and 0.3–22.5% (nonlinear) deviation from experimental results. The analysis results showed that the cylinders can carry more pressure after a slight decrease in pressure and recovery of the supporting load. For layer failure analysis, it was found that the failure that occurred in the 0° layer was more serious than that in the 90° layer within the neighboring layers at the inner layers (nos. 1–7) and outer layers (nos. 8–24).