Deflection and Snapping of Ring-Loaded Spherical Caps

Abstract

The axisymmetric behavior of both shallow, and deep, ring-loaded spherical caps, which are simply supported but otherwise unconstrained at their edges, is investigated using a large-strain shell theory based on a variational principle. A numerical technique is used to extract the solution. Particular attention is paid to highly nonlinear phenomena such as snapthrough, single and multiple snapback, and load-free everted states.