Buckling and Post buckling

Wrinkles are commonly observed in uniaxially stretched rectangular sheets with clamped-clamped boundaries, and can disappear upon excess stretching. Here we explore this wrinkling and restabilization behavior both analytically and numerically. We find that Poisson’s ratio plays a crucial role in the wrinkling and restabilization behavior. Smaller Poisson’s ratio makes later onset of wrinkling, lower amplitude and earlier disappearance of wrinkles.

Wrinkles commonly occur in uniaxially stretched rectangular hyperelastic membranes with clamped-clamped boundaries, and can vanish upon excess stretching. Here we develop a modeling and resolution framework to solve this complex instability problem with highly geometric and material nonlinearities. We extend the nonlinear Foppl-von Karman thin plate model to finite membrane strain regime for various compressible and incompressible hyperelastic materials.

Photo-chromic liquid crystalline polymer (LCP) is a type of smart materials which are sensitive to light. Here we harness its photo-mechanical response to flexibly control surface patterning, through modeling a film involving homeotropic nematic liquid crystals with director perpendicular to the polymer film attached on a compliant substrate. Theoretical and numerical analyses were conducted to explore the surface instability of such film/substrate systems under both uniform and non-uniform illuminations by ultraviolet (UV) light, respectively.

F. Xu, M. Potier-Ferry, S. Belouettar, H. Hu

International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnonlinmec.2014.12.006

Abstract:

Finite element method (FEM) with fixed representative volume element (RVE) encounters some difficulties in simulating the periodical postbuckling behaviors of infinite long beam or infinite large film on soft substrate under compression, because the wavelength and pattern of buckling are not known before simulation and will change with the increase of compression strain.