Elastic instabilities using auto-07p

Elastic materials can undergo instabilities — a smooth or dramatic change in morphology — when the applied load exceeds a critical value. These elastic instability problems are boundary value problems, notoriously hard to solve even numerically.

In this 4-part tutorial series we use auto-07p, a numerical continuation package, to solve for deformation fields and capture instabilities. Read the framework overview first, then work through the four problems below. All codes are on GitHub. A full PDF collection is available here.