In design of modern lightweight structures, it is of technical importance to ensure safety against buckling under the applied loading conditions. If the analysis process traces unstable paths under the global load-displacement response with negative stiffness, the arc-length method is effectively usable. However, if instability is localized, global solution methods may not work. The latest general purpose finite element codes provide automatic mechanisms for stabilizing unstable quasi-static problems by automatic addition of viscous damping to the model. When local instability occurs, deformation rate of that portion begins to increase and, consequently, locally released strain energy is dissipated due to the appended artificial damping effect. Elastic buckling of thin-walled shells is typically a local instability phenomenon. In this paper, we traced the successive path jumping behavior of elastic thin shells using the artificial damping method. The automatic seamless simulation provides good agreement with the experimentally observed buckling process well covering deep post-buckling region.
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