Performing a Post-Buckling Analysis On A Thin-Walled Cylinder in Ansys Mechanical

Ansys Mechanical has been continually improving its large-deflection, plasticity, and contact capabilities. One way that this shows up is in a post-buckling simulation of a thin-walled cylinder. It’s such a well-known, tricky problem that NAFEMS added it to its suite of challenge problems. PADT’s Alex Grishin takes on the challenge in Ansys Mechanical and shares all the steps needed to set up the problem, run it, and even provides a handy APDL macro to accurately calculate cylinder stresses, improving element birth and death accuracy.

Here is a video showing the crushed cylinder.

Remember, this is using the implicit solver in Ansys Mechanical, not Ansys LS-Dyna!

Presentation: Performing a Post-Buckling Simulation on a Thin-Walled Cylinder in Ansys Mechanical

Here is Alex’s presentation with all the steps and detailed explanations of each:

You can download this zip file to get all the files and run this yourself: