Secondary buckling of an elastic column with spring-supports at clamped ends

Summary

The postbuckling behavior of an elastic column with spring supports of equal stiffness of extensional type at both clamped ends is studied. Attention is focused on those of spring stiffnesses near the critical value at which, under axial load, the column becomes critical with respect to two buckling modes simultaneously. By using the Liapunov-Schmidt-Koiter approach, we show that there are precisely two secondary bifurcation points on each primary postbuckling state for the spring stiffness greater than the critical value. The bifurcation takes place at one of the two least buckling loads. The corresponding secondary postbuckling states connect all the secondary bifurcation points in a loop. For the spring stiffness less than the critical value, no secondary bifurcation occurs. Asymptotic expansions of the primary and secondary postbuckling states are constructed. The stability analysis indicates that the primary postbuckling state for the spring stiffness greater than the critical value is bifurcating from the first buckling load and becomes unstable from a stable state via the secondary bifurcation, i.e., secondary buckling occurs.