Investigate the buckling strength of a design with and without environmental loads with easy-to-use SOLIDWORKS Simulation to ensure that it meets product requirements for strength, performance, and safety.
Tightly integrated with SOLIDWORKS CAD, buckling analysis using SOLIDWORKS Simulation can be a regular part of your design process—reducing the need for costly prototypes, eliminating rework or delays, and saving time and development costs.
Buckling Analysis Overview
Buckling analysis calculates the critical failure loads of slender structures under compression. Understanding a design’s buckling strength is important in predicting possible failure modes or types of analysis required to best understand performance.
Forces that act perpendicular to the “thin” direction of a slender structure are called membrane forces, which can alter the bending stiffness of a structure. Tensile membrane forces increase lateral stiffness; compressive membrane forces decrease lateral stiffness.
SOLIDWORKS Simulation analyzes for linear elastic buckling, where there is a critical load (Pcrit) after which the structure is incapable of supporting any incremental load. At this load, any slight disturbance makes the structure unstable.
SOLIDWORKS Simulation calculates the buckling load factor which is a scale factor for the applied load to obtain the critical load, which is similar in nature to the stress factor of safety (FoS).