
10
Thick-walled Cylinders and Disks
In this chapter, we shall consider a class of problems in which the stresses and dis-
placements depend only on the radius r in the cylindrical coordinate system (r,
θ
,z).
The problems are therefore axisymmetric (i.e. there is no variation with the angle
θ
)
nor is there any variation with the distance z along the axis.
Practical applications include a thick-walled cylinder loaded by internal or ex-
ternal pressure, a cylindrical grinding wheel loaded as a result of centrifugal accel-
eration during rotation, an automotive brake disk with an axisymmetric temperature
distribution due to frictional heating, or the contact stresses developed when a cylin-
drical wheel is shrunk or pressed onto a cylindrical shaft.
10.1 Solution method
These applications are of considerable importance in their own right, but the study
of axisymmetric problems has the additional advantage of introducing the reader to
the methods used in the more advanced theories of elasticity, thermoelasticity and
plasticity in a conveniently simple context.
The solution depends on the following three physical requirements:
(i) Each particle of the body must satisfy Newton’s second law. This imposes a con-
dition on the stress field in the body, since the tractions on the imaginary surface
defining a particle are actually stress components. If there are no accelerations,
this is an equilibrium condition.
(ii) The stresses and strains are related by a constitutive law for the material, which
can be determined by performing appropriate experiments on idealized speci-
mens. In the linear elastic r´egime, this will be Hooke’s law [equations (1.14–
1.16)], but we shall also consider problems in the plastic r´egime for elastic-
perfectly plastic materials (§5.2.3), for which the constitutive law is the yield
criterion for the material (§2.2.3).
(iii) The deformation must be kinematically possible, which places constraints on
the admissible strain distributions. This is sometimes known as the compatibility
condition.
J.R. Barber, Intermediate Mechanics of Materials, Solid Mechanics and Its Applications 175,
2nd ed., DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0295-0_10, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011