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Developed herein are the scaling laws for physical modeling of anti-symmetric cross-ply laminated circular cylindrical shells for buckling and free vibration experiments. In the absence of experimental data, the validity of the scaling laws is verified by numerical experiments. This is accomplished by calculating theoretically the buckling loads and fundamental frequencies of the model and substituting into the scaling laws to obtain the corresponding values of the prototype. The predicted values of the prototype from the scaling laws are then compared with existing closed-form solutions. Examples for the complete similitude cases with various stacking sequences, number of plies, and length-to-radius ratios show exact agreement. The derived relationships between the model and prototype will greatly facilitate and reduce the need for costly experiments. In reality, either due to the complexity of the scaling laws or to economize experimental cost and time, it may not be feasible to construct the model to fulfil the scaling laws completely. Thus, several possible models of partial similitude are investigated numerically. These include models with distortion in laminated material properties, stacking sequences and number of plies. Model with distortion in material properties yields a high percentage of discrepancy and is not recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The similitude invariants and scaling laws for the buckling and free vibration of antisymmetric angle-ply laminated circular cylindrical shells were derived by directly applying the similitude transformation to the governing differential equations of the problem considered. The scaling laws relate the buckling load and natural frequency of a model to those of a prototype when the similarity requirements between the two systems are fulfilled. In the absence of experimental data, the validity of the scaling laws was verified by calculating theoretically the buckling loads and fundamental frequencies of vibration of the model and substituting them into the scaling laws to yield values for the prototype, which were then compared with those directly computed for the prototype. The numerical studies show that for the case of complete similitude with various stacking sequence, number of plies, and radius ratio, the solutions predicted by the similitude theory agree exactly with those obtained directly from the theory. Some typical partial similitude cases were also investigated. It was demonstrated that the partial similitude model with distortion in stacking sequence is reliable for predicting the behavior of the prototype. On the other hand, models with distortion in material properties are not recommended because of the existence of large discrepancies in the predicted results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]