A nonlocal two-dimensional analysis of instabilities in tubes under internal pressure (Q1970555)

The authors investigate the post-bifurcation behavior and imperfection sensitivity of elastic-plastic tubes under internal pressure. This is a practically very important but theoretically very complicated problem. Hence for a realistic engineering modelling, solutions can be obtained only by using a numerical procedure. Since experiments show that, starting from a symmetric configuration, the critical bifurcation modes are nonsymmetric, generally speaking a full three-dimensional analysis would be required to achieve good agreement of computational results with experiments. Since a full three-dimensional post-bifurcation analysis requires a great effort, the main purpose of this paper is to show that the three-dimensional behaviour may be accurately approximated by a two-dimensional nonlocal membrane finite element analysis, where the third dimension (the thickness direction) is taken into account in the continuum description by an incorporated material length scale accounting for the current thickness of tube wall during the deformation. The authors derive the field equations for finite strains in a Lagrangian convected coordinate formulation. The localized necking behaviour is initiated by prescribing small initial imperfections, and the computations are performed by a mixed finite element/Rayleigh-Ritz method in incremental form. Numerous interesting results are presented which are not only compared with experiments but also with results obtained from other theoretical investigations. This is an important paper not only for readers interested in theoretical investigation of elastic-plastic bifurcations of tubes, but also for those interested in the practically important engineering problem of the post-bifurcation behaviour of pressure vessels.