Post-buckling analysis of shell and membrane structures by dynamic relaxation method

Abstract

The family of arc-length method has been used for the post-buckling analysis of structures. However, it often becomes intractable for complex nonlinear problems. For instance, the incremental solution hangs about and never reaches the desired deformation when wrinkling appears after the buckling of membrane structures. In order to cope with this problem, alternative methods have been proposed, e.g., the dynamic relaxation (DR) method and the DR arc-length method. The applicability of these methods to the post-buckling analysis of shell and membrane structure is investigated in the present research, where the mixed interpolation of tensorial components (MITC) shell element is used for the FE modeling. It is shown that the DR and the DR arc-length methods are much more robust than the arc-length method, but for complicated nonlinear problems, a continuous deformation path can not be obtained by any of the three methods.