Buckling and Post-buckling Behaviour of Prismatic Aluminium Columns Submitted to a Series of Compressive Loads

The buckling and post-buckling behaviour of prismatic aluminium columns from stocky to very slender shapes is investigated. The unconventional, in terms of buckling tests, displacement control of compressive load and a series of loadings provided an enhanced insight into the buckling process. A phenomenon of buckling load drop has been detected in columns of intermediate slenderness, reaching over 20% of the load early critical value. This newly observed occurrence resembles finite disturbance instability, which until recently was commonly believed to only appear in cases of thin walled cylindrical shells, but not columns. The observation is in contradiction to predicted results from the elasto-plastic buckling models of Engesser or Shanley, with constant or growing values of load during the post-buckling process. Further tests on columns of intermediate slenderness, with strain gauges glued at node and anti-node locations of the buckled profiles, revealed that even minute buckling results in fields of highly non-symmetric residual microplastic strain. The results of the present study indicate that running column buckling tests under displacement control is worthy of being adopted as common practice. The envelope of column post-buckling states can be conveniently determined. This information will in turn allow for the quick and reliable estimation of the safety of a column, which has undergone accidental or deliberate damage in the form of limited buckling when under operational load.