Inelastic Buckling of Shallow Arches

A numerical procedure is presented for the determination of the inelastic buckling behavior of shallow circular arches subjected to arbitrary loadings. The prebuckling deformation, maximum pressure, critical buckling mode and stress distribution for two clamped arches, which are made of the same material but of different geometry and subjected to uniform pressure, have been numerically determined. The numerical results indicate that an inelastic arch may have a symmetric or asymmetric deformation mode at the maximum pressure depending on its rise to thickness ratio. The maximum pressure may also be approximately determined by a tangent modulus formula.