A recent computational study identified four distinct domains of stability behaviour at different lengths in thin elastic cylindrical shells under global bending. Cylinders of sufficient length suffer from fully-developed cross-sectional ovalisation and fail by local buckling at a moment very close to the Brazier prediction. Progressively shorter cylinders experience less ovalisation owing to the increasingly strong restraint provided by the boundary at the edges. Very short thin cylinders, however, restrain the formation of even a local buckle and fail through a limit point instability at moments and curvatures significantly in excess of the classical elastic prediction. This limit point behaviour is not caused by ovalisation but by the growth of a destabilising fold on the compressed meridian.

The nonlinear behaviour of very short cylinders under global bending is investigated in detail herein, covering a wide range of lengths, radius to thickness ratios and boundary conditions with both restrained and unrestrained meridional rotations corresponding to ‘clamped’ and ‘simply-supported’ conditions respectively. Two types of imperfections are investigated, the critical buckling eigenmode and a realistic manufacturing-related ‘weld depression’. A complex insensitivity to these imperfections is revealed owing to a pre-buckling stress state dominated by local compatibility bending, and the cylinder length is confirmed as playing a crucial role in governing this behaviour. The study contributes to the characterisation of multi-segment shells with very short individual cylindrical segments, often found in the aerospace and marine industries as well as in specialised civil engineering applications such as LIPP® silos.