Buckling analysis of a missile interstage

The NASTRAN program was used to find the buckling location and the degradation factor due to a specified temperature field for an interstage of a typical three stage missile. The model was made up of 6332 independent degrees of freedom. This large size required the use of an IBM 370/195 for evaluation of the eigenvalues. The effect of elevated temperature was to lower the critical buckling load by 3%.