Nonlinear behaviour and stability of thin-walled shells

This book focuses on the nonlinear behaviour of thin-wall shells (single- and multilayered with delamination areas) under various uniform and non-uniform loadings. The dependence of critical (buckling) load upon load variability is revealed to be highly non-monotonous, showing minima when load variability is close to the eigenmode variabilities of solution branching points of the respective nonlinear boundary problem. A novel numerical approach is employed to analyze branching points and to build primary, secondary, and tertiary bifurcation paths of the nonlinear boundary problem for the case of uniform loading. The load levels of singular points belonging to the paths are considered to be critical load estimates for the case of non-uniform loadings.