Detecting symmetry‐breaking bifurcation points of symmetric structures

Abstract

AbstractIn engineering applications often problems with symmetric system and symmetric loading occur. It is well known that these symmetry conditions can be used to reduce the computational effort. Thus, only a symmetric reduced system is treated with sufficient boundary and loading conditions. Especially for non‐linear problems this procedure is very effective. Such a strategy allows the computation of solution paths with the constraint that the solution has to be symmetric. Consequently in a stability analysis, only limit points and bifurcation points with associated symmetrical eigenvectors can be found. Often the stability behaviour is dominated by symmetry‐breaking bifurcation points which cannot be detected considering only the tangent stiffness matrix of the reduced system. Hence, in case of stability considerations a calculation of the complete system is necessary. This paper introduces a special form of stability analysis of the complete system using only certain matrices known from the symmetric reduced system, and some transformations concerning the topology of the total system. The proposed methods base on a substructure technique for symmetry under reflections and rotations, and are formulated for the finite element method. Numerical examples are given to show the efficiency of the proposed procedures and algorithms.