Abstract: The cylindrical shell structure has been widely used in the various fields. However, the cylindrical shells are liable to catastrophic buckling, because of the notorious imperfection. The aim of this work is to investigate the buckling of the cylindrical shells based on the non-linear finite element analysis program ABAQUS and applied to the buckling analysis of cans. Firstly, the numerical simulation method was used to verify the buckling test results of the can by Virot et al. In order to obtain some qualitative results of buckling,the buckling behaviour of the cylindrical shells will be investigated. In this article, we focus on the effect of different load combinations and different geometric parameters of the cylindrical shells. The straightforward, simple analysis of the buckling of the cylindrical shells under the axially compressed-lateral perturbation load is presented. We show that the three-dimensional curves of external force-buckling load-displacement called landscape. The numerical results indicate that: the phenomenon of "cliff" appears in the force-displacement curves of specimens under the action of lateral pressure-axially compressed-torsional load; It will be appreciated that the torsional is not conducive to the stability of the specimen and makes the specimen sensitive to the initial imperfections; For specimen under axially compressed-torsional load, in this paper, the plane with zero bearing capacity is defined as "sea level" to distinguish the failure modes of specimens; The results of specimens with different boundary conditions shows that the bearing capacity of the cylindrical shells can be improved with fixed boundaries. The internal pressure can greatly improve the bearing capacity and stability of the structure and reduce the imperfection-sensitivity.