LOCALIZATION IN COMPRESSION SANDWICH STRUCTURES: A DISCUSSION OF THEORETICAL FORMULATIONS AND PHYSICAL EXPERIMENTATION

compression, there is potential for the structure to exhibit complex interactive buckling phenomena; the Euler mode, over the complete length of a structure, combines with a local buckling mode of a face plate in a nonlinear fashion to introduce localized buckling. This is a severe form of instability with the consequence that linear critical loads [1] may never be obtained in the design life of such a structural component. Analysing this problem mathematically requires a careful potential energy treatment that begins with the strut on an elastic foundation model whose equation [2],