Scleral buckling is a highly successful technique for the repair of rhegmatogenous retinal detachment that requires intra-operative examination of the retina and treatment of retinal breaks via indirect ophthalmoscopy. Data suggest that scleral buckling likely results in improved outcomes for many patients but is declining in popularity, perhaps because of significant advances in vitrectomy ins...

Metal thin-walled members have been widely used in building industry. Usually they are utilized as purlins, girts or ceiling beams. Due to slenderness of thin-walled cross-sections these structural members are prone to stability problems (e.g. flexural buckling, lateral torsional buckling). If buckling is not constructionally prevented their resistance is limited by buckling strength. In practi...

This paper presents the buckling analysis of the piezoelectric functionally graded material (FGM) rectangular plates subjected to non-uniformly distributed loads, heat and voltage based on the mesh-free method. A two-step solution procedure is implemented. The first step is to determine the pre-buckling stresses of the plates subjected to non-uniformly distributed loads. The second step is to s...

A study is presented of the post-buckling behavior and imperfection-sensitivity of complete spherical shells subject to uniform external pressure. The study builds on and extends the major contribution to spherical shell buckling by W.T. Koiter in the 1960’s. Numerical results are presented for the axisymmetric large deflection behavior of perfect spheres followed by an extensive analysis of th...

Instability and structural transitions arise in many important problems involving dynamics at molecular length scales. Buckling of an elastic rod under a compressive load offers a useful general picture of such a transition. However, the existing theoretical description of buckling is applicable in the load response of macroscopic structures, only when fluctuations can be neglected, whereas mem...

As shown three decades ago, in situations where the initial stresses before buckling are not negligible compared to the elastic moduli, the geometrical dependence of the tangential moduli on the initial stresses must be taken into account in stability analysis, and the stability or bifurcation criteria have different forms for tangential moduli associated with different choices of the finite st...

Filopodia are long, thin protrusions formed when bundles of fibers grow outwardly from a cell surface while remaining closed in a membrane tube. We study the subtle issue of the mechanical stability of such filopodia and how this depends on the deformation of the membrane that arises when the fiber bundle adopts a helical configuration. We calculate the ground state conformation of such filopod...

It is of great significance to understand the underlying mechanism of buckling-driven wrinkles in graphene monolayer due to its applications in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). In previous macroscopic studies based on continuum theory, the chirality-dependent buckling in graphene monolayer is considered as neglectable. However, we found that the growth of buckling-driven wrinkles in graphe...

The deformation of slender structures (i.e., structures that are much longer in one direction than in the other two directions) may be described by elastic rod theory if one is interested in phenomena on length scales much larger than the lateral dimensions of the structure. A simplified version of this theory, beam theory, suffices if only small deformations need to be considered. Many traditi...

It is well known that optimisation of structures where instability phenomena are present can result in severe imperfection sensitivity [9, 10]. Classical examples are the simple Augusti model and stiffened plates [2, 4]. In both examples, the imperfection sensitivity is due to the interaction of two buckling modes. If the critical loads corresponding to the two buckling modes are well separated...