instability

Can a single-degree-of-freedom elastic structure have two buckling loads?

We provide a positive answer to this question, see http://www.ing.unitn.it/~bigoni/multiple_bifurcations.html

Dielectric elastomer (DE) is a kind of electroactive polymer material,
capable of large deformation up to 380%. However, under conservative
operating conditions, DE is susceptible to instability with a small
deformation due to various modes of failure, including electrical
breakdown, electromechanical instability (EMI), loss of tension and
rupture by stretch. This paper proposes a free energy model in the
thermodynamic system of DE involving thermoelastic strain energy,
electric energy and purely thermal contribution energy to obtain the
stability conditions of all failure modes. The numerical results
indicate that the increase in temperature can markedly contribute to
improving the entropy production, the actuation stress and the critical

We are looking for suitable candidates for a PhD research work in Computational Mechanics and numerical simulation, to be carried out at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Aveiro, Portugal, in one of the following areas:

- development of new finite elements for metal forming applications;

- numerical simulation of metal forming (sheet and bulk forming);

- tubular hydroforming numerical simulation;

- structural stability and buckling analysis of reinforced aircraft panels;

In a previous work, substrate-modulated morphology of graphene was analyzed using a numerical Monte Carlo method. Here we present an analytical approach that explicitly relates the van der Waals interaction energy to the surface corrugation and the interfacial properties. Moreover, the effect of mismatch strain is considered, which predicts a strain-induced instability under a compressive strain and reduced corrugation under a tensile strain.