Shell Structures in Civil & Mechanical Engineering

Shell Structures in Civil and Mechanical Engineering, joint winner of the University of Cape Town Book Award for 2019, comprehensively covers the theories governing the membrane and bending behaviour of thin elastic shells. It applies these theories to obtain practical solutions for a wide variety of shell structures encountered in the civil and mechanical engineering disciplines. Through a detailed examination of the mathematical solutions, the treatment reveals important insights on the mechanics of the shell, allowing the designer to make more informed choices.

Shell Structures in Civil and Mechanical Engineering:

• presents a thorough discussion of the applicability and limitations of the membrane hypothesis in the context of the more general bending theory of shells
• develops the membrane and bending theories of shells, and presents a wealth of closed-form mathematical results for a wide range of shell structures, including junction problems
• includes design considerations and parametric findings for domes, shell roofs, cooling towers, pressure vessels, tanks, new shell forms for liquid containment and novel multi-shell assemblies
• presents the fundamentals of shell buckling and of finite element modelling of shells.

This new edition is intended for civil and structural engineers involved with the design of domes, architectural shell roofs, industrial barrel roofs, cooling towers, silos, elevated water reservoirs, liquid-containment structures at water treatment works, egg-shaped sludge digesters, oil-storage tanks, chemical storage vessels, and pipelines for water, oil and gas.

It will also be of interest to mechanical and industrial engineers involved with the design of pressure vessels, boilers, nuclear containment vessels and associated piping. The rigorous derivation of theory and inclusion of new findings will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in these fields.

Alphose Zingoni PhD DIC PrEng CEng FSAAE FIABSE FIStructE is Professor of Structural Engineering and Mechanics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town. He earned a PhD degree from Imperial College London in 1992 for a thesis on the bending of non-shallow spherical shells. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Zimbabwe from 1997 to 1999, and as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town from 2008 to 2012. A past recipient of a Research Fellowship of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (1992-94), his current research interests encompass shell structures, structural vibration analysis, finite element modelling, studies of symmetry, and applications of group theory to computational problems in structural mechanics. He has also written a book on vibration analysis, which was published in 2015. He serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, and is registered as a Professional Engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa, and as a Chartered Engineer with the Engineering Council of the UK.