A proposed set of popular limit-point buckling benchmark problems

Abstract

Developers of new finite elements or nonlinear solution techniques rely on discriminative benchmark tests drawn from the literature to assess the advantages and drawbacks of new formulations. Buckling benchmark tests provide a rigorous evaluation of finite elements applied to thin structures, and a complete and detailed set of reference results would therefore prove very useful in carrying out such evaluations. Results are usually presented in the form of load-deflection curves that developers must reconstruct by extracting the points, a procedure which is often tedious and inaccurate. Moreover the curves are usually given without accompanying information such as the calculation time or number of iterations it took for the model to converge, even though this type of data is equally important in practice. This paper presents ten different limit-point buckling benchmark tests, and provides for each one the reference load-deflection curve, all the points necessary to recreate the curve in tabulated form, analysis data such as calculation time, number of iterations and increments, and all of the inputs used to obtain these results.