Secondary Buckling Analysis of Thin Rectangular Plates Based on the Wavelet Galerkin Method

Abstract

Application of the wavelet Galerkin method (WGM) to numerical solution of nonlinear buckling problems was studied with classical elastic thin rectangular plates. First, the discretized scheme of the von Kármán equation were introduced, then a simple calculation approach to the Jacobian and Hessian matrices based on the WGM was proposed, and the wavelet discretized scheme-based eigenvalue equation method, the extended equation method and the pseudo arc-length method for nonlinear buckling analysis were discussed. Second, the secondary post-buckling equilibrium paths of elastic thin rectangular plates and the effects of aspect ratios, boundary conditions and bi-directional compression on the mode jumping behaviors, were discussed in detail. Numerical results show that, the WGM possesses good convergence for solving buckling loads on rectangular plates, and the obtained equilibrium paths are in good agreement with those from the stability experiments, the 2-step perturbation method and the nonlinear finite element method. Given the feasibility of combination with different bifurcation computation methods, the WGM makes an efficient spatial discretization method for complex nonlinear stability problems of typical plates and shells.