Buckling and wrinkling of prestressed membranes

This paper deals with the numerical computation of buckles and wrinkles appearing in membrane structures by means of the total Lagrangian formulation, using genuine membrane finite elements (with zero bending stiffness) and a prestressed hyperelastic constitutive law. The bifurcation analysis is carried out without assuming any imperfections in the structure. The standard arclength method is modified by means of a specific solution procedure to cope with the occurrence of complex roots when solving the quadratic constraint equation. Applying the proposed formulation to a set of typical numerical examples shows its ability to correctly predict the wrinkling and buckling behaviour in membrane structures.