Axially compressed thin cylindrical shells: Asymptotic limits for a nonlinear basic state

The work presented here revisits the classical bifurcation problem for an axially compressed thin elastic circular cylinder when the nonlinear pre-buckling bending deformations are taken into account. Suitable scaling arguments and singular perturbation methods enable us to explore the link with the more widely studied classical cases in which the uniform membrane solution was used for describing the basic state. Our novel theoretical results are confirmed by direct numerical simulations of the full boundary-value problems corresponding to the relevant buckling scenarios.