Instabilities of wrinkled membranes with pressure loadings

Wrinkling can affect the functionality of thin membranes subjected to various loadings or boundary conditions. The concept of relaxed strain energy was studied for isotropic, hyperelastic, axisymmetric membranes pressurized by gas or fluid. Non-intuitive instabilities were observed when axisymmetric wrinkled membranes were perturbed with angle dependent displacement fields. A linearized theory showed that static equilibrium states of pressurized membranes, modelled by a relaxed strain energy formulation, are unstable, when the wrinkled surface is subjected to pressure loadings. The theory is extended to the non-axisymmetric membranes and it is shown that these instabilities are local phenomena. Simulations for the pressurized cylindrical membranes with non-uniform thickness and hemispherical membranes support the claims in both theoretical and numerical contexts including finite element simulations.