On the buckling of an elastic holey column.

We report the results of a numerical and theoretical study of buckling in elastic columns containing a line of holes. Buckling is a common failure mode of elastic columns under compression, found over scales ranging from metres in buildings and aircraft to tens of nanometers in DNA. This failure usually occurs through lateral buckling, described for slender columns by Euler's theory. When the column is perforated with a regular line of holes, a new buckling mode arises, in which adjacent holes collapse in orthogonal directions. In this paper, we firstly elucidate how this alternate hole buckling mode coexists and interacts with classical Euler buckling modes, using finite-element numerical calculations with bifurcation tracking. We show how the preferred buckling mode is selected by the geometry, and discuss the roles of localized (hole-scale) and global (column-scale) buckling. Secondly, we develop a novel predictive model for the buckling of columns perforated with large holes. This model is derived without arbitrary fitting parameters, and quantitatively predicts the critical strain for buckling. We extend the model to sheets perforated with a regular array of circular holes and use it to provide quantitative predictions of their buckling.

Buckling of a holey column.

We report the results from a combined experimental and numerical investigation of buckling in a novel variant of an elastic column under axial load. We find that including a regular line of centred holes in the column can prevent conventional, global, lateral buckling. Instead, the local microstructure introduced by the holes allows the column to buckle in an entirely different, internal, mode in which the holes are compressed in alternate directions, but the column maintains the lateral reflection symmetry about its centreline. The internal buckling mode can be accommodated within a smaller external space than the global one; and it is the preferred buckling mode over an intermediate range of column lengths for sufficiently large holes. For very short or sufficiently long columns a modification of the classical, global, lateral buckling is dominant.

Flutter in a quasi-one-dimensional model of a collapsible channel.

The effects of wall inertia on instabilities in a collapsible channel with a long finite-length flexible wall containing a high Reynolds number flow of incompressible fluid are studied. Using the ideas of interactive boundary layer theory, the system is described by a one-dimensional model that couples inviscid flow outside the boundary layers formed on the channel walls with the deformation of the flexible wall. The observed instability is a form of flutter, which is superposed on the behaviour of the system when the wall mass is neglected. We show that the flutter has a positive growth rate because the fluid loading acts as a negative damping in the system. We discuss these findings in relation to other work on self-excited oscillations in collapsible channels.

Suppression of complex fingerlike patterns at the interface between air and a viscous fluid by elastic membranes.

Growth of complex dendritic fingers at the interface of air and a viscous fluid in the narrow gap between two parallel plates is an archetypical problem of pattern formation. We find a surprisingly effective means of suppressing this instability by replacing one of the plates with an elastic membrane. The resulting fluid-structure interaction fundamentally alters the interfacial patterns that develop and considerably delays the onset of fingering. We analyze the dependence of the instability on the parameters of the system and present scaling arguments to explain the experimentally observed behavior.