Buckling of a viscoelastic rod (Q798049)

In this very interesting paper plane buckling of a thin inextensible, linearly viscoelastic rod is studied. The ends of the rod are pinned and constrained to move on a line in the direction of the endload. The mathematical formulation leads to a nonlinear boundary value problem governed by an integro-differential equation. By means of the Lyapunov- Schmidt method the boundary value problem is reduced to the solution of a bifurcation equation which turns out to be a nonlinear integral equation with a singularity. The results obtained are quite interesting physically because they show that concerning the bifurcated solutions not only the critical value of the load P is important but also the derivative of P with respect to time at criticality. The stability problem of the different bifurcated branches is still open.