This paper investigates symmetrical buckling of orthotropic circular and annular plates of continuous variable thickness. Uniform compression loading is applied at the plate outer boundary. Thickness varies linearly along radial direction. Inner edge is free, while outer edge has different boundary conditions: clamped, simply and elastically restraint against rotation. The optimized RayLeigh-Ri...

Tests on eighteen small scale models which simulate the elastic and post-buckling behaviour of plate girders when subjected to shear loading are reported and discussed. Themodels were fabricated of steel and Araldite; the major aim was to assess whether small scale models can be employed to study shear buckling problems. A secondary object was to examine whether araldite could be used for predi...

There is a strong requirement for more robust, lighter and cheaper launch vehicle structures. Unstiffened composite cylindrical shells, which are essential to the fabrication of launch vehicle airframes, are prone to buckling and are highly sensitive to imperfections which arise during the manufacturing process. The buckling load is an important characteristic in design, and may vary drasticall...

When compared to tests on reinforced concrete (RC) walls with a rectangular or barbelled crosssection, only very few tests on RC walls with open cross-section exist. Most of these walls were subjected to unidirectional or bidirectional loading along one or both of the principal axes of the wall section. It was rare that tests were done using load paths that did not follow the principal axes. Th...

A network of entangled multiwall carbon nanotubes is an assembly of non-bonded and randomly oriented units whose mechanical behavior is affected by their buckling, compression and slippage at contact points. Slippage and irreversible nanotube rearrangements are evidenced by the hysteresis in the stress-strain curves during loading and unloading cycles. To model the mechanical behavior, a nonlin...

Exfoliated monolayer graphene flakes were embedded in a polymer matrix and loaded under axial compression. By monitoring the shifts of the 2D Raman phonons of rectangular flakes of various sizes under load, the critical strain to failure was determined. Prior to loading care was taken for the examined area of the flake to be free of residual stresses. The critical strain values for first failur...

We embarked upon developing a novel parallel simulation platform that is rooted in microphysical mechanisms. Primarily aiming at large-scale reinforced-concrete structures exposed to cyclic loading, we sought to settle the question as to how to capture nonlinear shear, localized damage and progressive buckling of reinforcing bar. We proposed a tribology-inspired three-dimensional (3-D) interloc...