The elastic buckling of shell structures such as spherical shells subject to external pressure and cylindrical shells loaded in axial compression is highly sensitive to imperfections and often catastrophic. Recent studies of spherical shells have provided accurate quantitative results for the relation between the buckling pressure and the amplitude and shape of geometric imperfections and, addi...

Current American design provisions treat unstiffened elements under stress gradients as if they were uniformly compressed for effective width calculations. Australian, British, and European design provisions allow accurate calculation of the elastic buckling coefficient, however, the same effective width equation for compressed elements is used for elements with stress gradients. In all cases, ...

Geometric imperfection, known as a detrimental effect on the buckling load of cylindrical shells, has a new role under the emerging trend of using buckling for smart purposes. Eigenshape-based geometries were designed on the shell surface with the aim of tailoring the postbuckling response. Fourteen seeded geometric imperfection (SGI) cylinders were fabricated using polymer-based 3D printing, a...

A recent experiment [Boncheva Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 3924 (2005)] introduced the possibility of initiating the self-assembly of a three-dimensional structure from a flat elastic sheet. The ultimate utility of this method for assembly depends on whether it leads to incorrect, metastable structures. Here we examine how the number of metastable states depends on the sheet shape and thi...

As technology continues towards smaller, thinner and lighter devices, more stringent demands are placed on thin polymer films as diffusion barriers, dielectric coatings, electronic packaging and so on. Therefore, there is a growing need for testing platforms to rapidly determine the mechanical properties of thin polymer films and coatings. We introduce here an elegant, efficient measurement met...

It is well known that buckling instabilities occur when elastic solids are subject to compressive stresses. However, this does not preclude the occurrence of instabilities in systems subject to global tensile loads. Such tensile instabilities may be caused by certain discontinuities (geometrical or material) which re-distribute the stresses applied on its boundary, generating local compressive ...

Three forms of elastic and plastic deformations at Au(111) surfaces have been observed by high-resolution electron microscopy. These are normal expansion of the first surface interplanar spacing, lateral expansions through surface dislocations, and the development of hill-and-valley structure or elastic buckling depending upon the sample morphology. These effects are interpreted as evidence for...

geometrically nonlinear governing equations for a plate with linear viscoelastic material are derived. the material model is of boltzmann superposi¬tion principle type. a third-order displacement field is used to model the shear deformation effects. for the solution of the nonlinear governing equations the dynamic relaxation (dr) iterative method together with the finite difference discretizati...