Acknowledgements
Professor J. Michael Rotter has been Convenor of the committee which drafted five different Eurocode Standards including EN 1991-4, EN 1993-1-6 and EN 1993-4-1 which are of relevance to this project. We are privileged to be carrying out research under his guidance and supervision and thank him for all his time and enthusiasm in helping us understand the complex theory of shell structures. We are very thankful for having access to the volume of work Professor Rotter has carried out in this area and only hope we can compliment it by carrying out a successful piece of research ourselves.
Thank you to our co-supervisor Dr. Martin Gillie for making ABAQUS seem easy. We look forward to working with him in the future development of our finite element models.
We are very grateful to Dr Zhijun Zhong for his advice in designing our physical models and to all the technical support officers in the structures laboratory, Jim Hutcheson, Derek Jardine, Douglas Carmichael, Neil Wood and Kevin Anderson for their experience and support in building them.
A very special word of thanks goes to our dear friend Francesco Figari for his expertise, advice and witticisms.
To our family and friends especially Aideen and Tatiana, for all the little things that can so often matter most.
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