Buckling of a compliant hollow cylinder attached to a rotating rigid shaft

Abstract

Bifurcations in the equilibrium shape of a thick elastic layer attached to a circular rigid cylinder rotating about its axis are investigated analytically and numerically. The centrifugal force breaks the symmetry of the system leading to deformations invariant along the axis as the result of an instability. The instability threshold depends at linear order on the relative thickness of the compliant layer, and on a dimensionless control parameter based on the elastic modulus, the angular velocity and the outer radius. A weakly non linear analysis, carried out for layers following the Mooney–Rivlin constitutive law, points out the discontinuous (sub-critical) features of the bifurcation, except for relative thickness laying in a very narrow range in which the bifurcation is super-critical. Numerical simulations in the fully post-buckled regime yield the absolute instability threshold, and the order in the rotational symmetry of the developed equilibrium shape.