RESEARCH ARTICLE
Numerical Investigation of Instability of Complex Spatial Structures
Wenbo Sun1, *, Weixing Zhou1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 402
Last Page: 417
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-10-402
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501610010402
Article History:
Received Date: 11/01/2016Revision Received Date: 26/03/2016
Acceptance Date: 07/04/2016
Electronic publication date: 29/07/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Consistent Imperfection Mode Method (CIMM) is a widely-used and effective numerical method to study the buckling capacity of spatial structure. CIMM used an “artificial” deformation instead of “artificial” load eccentricity to imitate the initial disturbance/imperfection for calculation of buckling load, and the basic mode obtained from linear buckling analysis could be used to simulate the distribution of imperfection. But in linear buckling analysis of certain complex spatial structures, the basic and first few modes usually reflect the local buckling of certain slim elements, and stability of complex structure depends on none of these local modes. Based on mode energy discrimination criterion, the improved CIMM is introduced. Improved CIMM includes following steps. 1) Normalization of all buckling modes. 2) Summarization of each mode of strain energy. 3) Discrimination of global modes with peak strain energy. 4) Based on first few global modes, CIMM could be used to calculate buckling loads respectively. 5) Choose the smallest buckling load as the buckling capacity of structure.