Post-buckling solutions of hyper-elastic beam by canonical dual finite element method

Abstract

The post-buckling problem of a large deformed beam is analyzed using the canonical dual finite element method (CD-FEM). The feature of this method is to choose correctly the canonical dual stress so that the original non-convex potential energy functional is reformulated in a mixed complementary energy form with both displacement and stress fields, and a pure complementary energy is explicitly formulated in finite dimensional space. Based on the canonical duality theory and the associated triality theorem, a primal–dual algorithm is proposed, which can be used to find all possible solutions of this non-convex post-buckling problem. Numerical results show that the global maximum of the pure-complementary energy leads to a stable buckled configuration of the beam, while the local extrema of the pure-complementary energy present unstable deformation states. We discovered that the unstable buckled state is very sensitive to the number of total elements and the external loads. Theoretical results are verified through numerical examples and some interesting phenomena in post-bifurcation of this large deformed beam are observed.