A NEW APPROACH OF PREDICTING BIFURCATION POINTS OF ELASTIC-PLASTIC BUCKLING OF PLATES AND SHELLS

The paper proposes a new approach of predicting the bifurcation points of elastic-plasticbuckling of plates and shells,which is obtained from the natural combination of the Lyaponov’s dy-namic criterion on stability and the modified adaptive Dynamic Relaxation(maDR)method developedrecently by the authors.This new method can overcome the difficulties in the applications of the dy-namic criterion.Numerical results show that the theoretically predicted bifurcation points are in verygood agreement with the corresponding experimental ones.The paper also provides a new means forfurther research on the plastic buckling paradox of plates and shells.