Post-Buckling Behavior of Thin Corrugated Panels, with Application to Gossamer Space Structures

The post-bucking behavior of at panels is a well-understood phenomenon. Diagonal tension eld theory has been in use from the early twentieth century and is critical to the e cient design of aircraft structures. The focus of this article is to expand existing theories to include the case of thin corrugated panels. Traditionally corrugated panels have been designed to be shear resistant (unbuckled). In this article the panels are allowed to go into the post-buckling regime, and thus develop signi cant deformations. Structural applications exist where this is highly bene cial, such as in the case of load introduction problems. Theoretical models are developed and successfully compared to numerical simulation