Elastic-plastic behavior of a semicircular frame being pressed against a rigid plane

As a simplified structural model, a semicircular frame is used to study the crashworthiness behavior of an aircraft fuselage. The quasi-static large elastic-plastic deformation of a semicircular frame in the process of its being pressed against a rigid ground is analyzed. First, based on the linear elastic assumption, the quasi-static large deformation contact process of the frame can be divided into three phases, i.e., point contact, line contact and post-buckling. By means of a shooting method, the relations between the displacement and contact force as well as the distribution of bending moment in the three phases are obtained. Then, by assuming an elastic, perfectly-plastic moment-curvature relationship for the semi-circular frame, the contact process is analyzed in detail to reveal the plastic collapse mechanism, the traveling of plastic hinge and the force-displacement relationship. In order to verify the analysis, a preliminary experiment was conducted, in which two types of half rings with clamped ends were pressed by a rigid plate. In addition, a numerical simulation is also conducted by employing ABAQUS to analyze both rectangular cross-sectional beam and I-beam. Finally, the theoretical predictions are compared with the experimental results and numerical solutions, showing that the elastic-plastic analysis can predict the contact process very well.

Complete Solution of Large Plastic Deformation of Square Plates Under Exponentially Decaying Pulse Loading

The rigid-plastic assumption has greatly simplified the theoretical analysis of dynamic plastic response of structures.Within this framework,a common tool is the modal technique using approximate independent yield criteria,which leads to upper-and lower-bound solutions,but usually with poor accuracy.In this paper,by utilizing the membrane factor method(MFM),the large-deflection dynamic plastic response of square plates subjected to exponentially decaying pulse loading is analyzed by taking both the transient response phase and the exact yield criterion into account.Based on the combination of saturation analysis(SA)and MFM,the complete solutions and regressive formulae of saturated deflection and saturated impulse are obtained.As the dynamic behavior of plates under rectangular pulse loading serves as a benchmark of pulse-equivalent techniques,the large plastic deformation of square plates under short-duration rectangular pulse is also analyzed in detail.Moreover,by comparing the SA results of pulse-loaded square plates with different boundary conditions,it is found that the saturated deflection and saturated impulse of the fully clamped and simply supported square plates both increase linearly with the pulse amplitude,and the slopes are approximately the same,so the conversion between the SA quantities of plates with different boundary conditions can be easily achieved.