Steady-State Limit of Elastoplastic Trusses for the Plastic Shakedown Region

Abstract

For elastoplastic trusses under quasi-static cyclic loading, a method is presented for finding the steady-state limit that bounds the plastic shakedown and ratchetting regions. In the plastic shakedown region, an assumption employed in the previous approaches for finding the steady-state limit can be invalid in many circumstances. Although strain reversals were assumed to occur only at load reversals, yielding of an element exhibiting plastic shakedown may cause strain reversals in other elements. This difficulty is overcome by relaxing this assumption so that the strain reversals due to yielding are taken into account. Numerical examples showed that the present method can find the steady-state limit even when strong effects of geometrical nonlinearity exist. [S0021-8936(00)01201-0]