Abstract: Present paper reports a numerical analysis for the postbuckling problem of thecircular cylindrical shell under axial compression using a spline curve shell element which isbased on the convected curvilinear coordinates. An artifice of passing through and evalu-ating bifurcation points and an improvement for the arc-length method are presented.Theload versus edge-short curve obtained is closer to the experiment result than the analyticalsolution and the postbuckling shape obtained is good agreement with the ...