Elastic Stability of Structures

This learning track covers the fundamental principles of structural instability and buckling, with a focus on rings, curved bars, and arches. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the critical load of structural elements and the different types of buckling. The track uses the example of a simply supported column to illustrate these concepts. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding structural stability for engineers, highlighting the catastrophic consequences of instability failures. The track further delves into the characteristics of equilibrium and the concept of critical load. It concludes by discussing various methods to calculate the critical load, including the equilibrium approach, energy approach, imperfection approach, and dynamic approach. The track also covers the kinetic approach for estimating the critical load of structural elements and different types of buckling. It further explores the fundamentals of weighted residual methods used in structural mechanics and their application in solving differential equations.

These courses have been developed by Prof. Sarat Kumar Panda from IIT-ISM for NPTEL. They are now accessible through Ansys Innovation Space courtesy of the partnership between Ansys and NPTEL, under the CC BY-SA license. For more details, visit https://nptel.ac.in/courses/105105217.