Buckling analysis of composite panels

The aim of this paper is to present the buckling analysis of a laboratory tested composite panel under axial compression by means of a simple shell finite element that is developed and presented herein. The tests were performed in the Aircraft Structure Laboratory of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion. Buckling is achieved via incremental geometrically nonlinear analysis and monitoring of the tangent stiffness matrix at each increment. The performance of the finite element is further validated by solving a complex multi-snap example from the literature. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.