A formulation and solution procedure for post-buckling of thin-walled structures

Abstract Transformations of nodal quantities between spacially fixed global coordinate system and element fixed local one are presented to give governing equilibrium equations for a post-buckling large displacement analysis of thin-walled three-dimensional structures. The transformations are established primarily on the basis of the description of the nodal locations by their initial coordinates as well as their displacements. An effective corrective process for constituting and solving structural incremental nonlinear equilibrium equations is developed by clear separation of the rigid body rotation from the displacements. Numerical examples show that the method can satisfactorily pursue nonlinear load-displacement behaviour, including snap-through and bifurcation buckling, only with incremental calculations and without any special techniques as eigenmode analysis.