ABSTRACT. This paper is concerned with the existence of equilibrium states of thin-walled elastic, cylindrical shell fully or partially submerged in a fluid. This problem obviously serves as a model for many problems with engineering importance. Previous studies on the deformation of the shell have assumed that the pressure due to the fluid is uniform. This paper takes into consideration the non-uniformity of the pressure by taking into account the effect of gravity. The presence of a pressure gradient brings additional parameters to the problem which in turn lead to the consideration of several boundary value problems.KEY WORDS AND PHRASES. Existence of equilibrium states, hollow elastic cylinders, nonlinear eigenvalue problem, non-linear integro-differential equation, minimization of functional with several constraints, Browder Theorem, linearly independent operators. 1980