Post‐buckling analysis of shallow shells by the field‐boundary‐element method

The non‐linear field‐boundary‐element technique is applied to the analysis of snap‐through phenomena in thin shallow shells. The equilibrium path is traced by using the arc‐length method and the solution strategy is discussed in detail. The results show that, as compared to the approaches based on the popular symmetric‐variational Galerkin finite element formulation, the current approach based on an unsymmetric variational Petrov–Galerkin field‐boundary‐element formulation gives a faster convergence while using fewer degrees of freedom. The illustrative numerical examples deal with post‐buckling responses of several shallow shells with different geometries.