Postbuckling strength of an axially compressed elastic circular cylinder with all symmetry broken

Axially compressed circular cylinders repeat symmetry-breaking bifurcation in the postbuckling region. There exist stable equilibria with all symmetry broken in the buckled configuration, and the minimum postbuckling strength is attained at the deep bottom of closely spaced equilibrium branches. The load level corresponding to such postbuckling stable solutions is usually much lower than the initial buckling load and may serve as a strength limit in shell stability design. The primary concern in the present paper is to compute these possible postbuckling stable solutions at the deep bottom of the postbuckling region. Two computational approaches are used for this purpose. One is the application of individual procedures in computational bifurcation theory. Path-tracing, pinpointing bifurcation points and (local) branch-switching are all applied to follow carefully the postbuckling branches with the decreasing load in order to attain the target at the bottom of the postbuckling region. The buckled shell configuration loses its symmetry stepwise after each (local) branch-switching procedure. The other is to introduce the idea of path jumping (namely, generalized global branch-switching) with static imperfection. The static response of the cylinder under two-parameter loading is computed to enable a direct access to postbuckling equilibria from the prebuckling state. In the numerical example of an elastic perfect circular cylinder, stable postbuckling solutions are computed in these two approaches. It is demonstrated that a direct path jump from the undeformed state to postbuckling stable equilibria is possible for an appropriate choice of static perturbations.