Polymorphic uncertainty modeling for the simulation of geometric imperfections in probabilistic design of cylindrical shells

Geometric imperfections are part of the disagreement between theoretically and experimentally determined buckling loads of cylindrical shells. Due to the random nature of the initial deviations, a probabilistic approach is used to predict the buckling loads, where spatial varying imperfections are modeled as Gaussian random fields. The shape of the fields depends, among others, on the autocorrelation structure, which depends on the manufacturing...