Buckling and postbuckling behavior is critical to the success of certain designs. For example, crash worthiness of an automobile requires that particular vehicle components collapse in ways that maximize energy absorption. On the other hand, successful designs of imperfection-sensitive, thin-walled shell structures, ranging from beverage containers to large pressure vessels, must prevent unintentional buckling.
This course blends the theoretical background on such topics as geometric nonlinearity and the Riks method together with examples, guidelines and workshops to demonstrate how to:
- Identify an imperfection-sensitive structure
- Extract closely spaced eigenvalues efficiently
- Introduce imperfections into a “perfect” mesh
- Use the Riks method effectively
- Use damping to control unstable motions