DETERMINATION OF STABILITY IN NONLINEAR-ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURES

This paper presents a systematic study of the problems of structural nonlinear instability. Emphasis is on the treatment of coincident critical points and the development of available theory making it possible to explore all postbuckling paths. To achieve such an aim, the paper first studies the asymptotic forms of general postbuckling equilibrium equations in the neighbourhood of a critical point. It is found that the asymptotic equations are different from each other for types of different critical points. These different asymptotic equations are derived and the stability is determined numerically.