Hydroforming and buckling of an egg-shaped shell based on a petal-shaped preform

This paper describes an experimental and numerical study of the hydroforming and buckling of an egg-shaped shell based on a petal-shaped preform. The preform was welded from 12 meridionally interconnected bent petals with a uniform thickness of 1.38 mm. Before bending, the blanked petals had a maximum width of 69.1 mm and a length of 474.6 mm. Each welding line between adjacent petals corresponded to the meridian of the target egg-shaped shell. The petal-shaped preform was filled with tap water and internally pressurized for hydroforming. The hydroformed egg-shaped shell was immersed in a pressure chamber for hydrostatic testing. After the experiment, the nonlinear finite element method was used to numerically study the hydroforming and buckling of the egg-shaped shell and the effect of internal pressure and weld seams on the buckling.

Automated summary

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study on the hydroforming and buckling of an egg-shaped shell using a petal-shaped preform. The study shows that the internal pressure and weld seams play a significant role in the buckling behavior of the shell.