Within the first half of the last century, a significant deviation between theoretical buckling loads of thin-walled shell structures and the buckling load determined experimentally was identified. The reason for this discrepancy is explained by the presence of imperfections having a degrading effect on the load carrying capacity of shell structures. To investigate the influence of imperfections on the real buckling load, different imperfection modelling approaches are developed. Within this paper the imperfection sensitivity of unstiffened circular cylindrical shell structures is investigated with the Single Perturbation Load Approach as well as the axis-symmetric imperfection modelling. Thereby, the influence of geometrical relations of the shell structures on the imperfection sensitivity is investigated. The achieved results are compared to empirical findings reported in literature.
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