THE WRINKLING OF RECTANGULAR WEBS UNDER NONLINEARLY DISTRIBUTED EDGE LOADING

Nonlinearly distributed in-plane tension at the edges of a thin, flat, rectangular material with small flexural stiffness, called a web, can cause it to wrinkle. Airy stress functions are determined in closed f orm for webs under arbitrarily prescribed, in-plane edge loading. The loading at impending wrinkling, and the corresponding wrinkling shape in the web, are predicted by the solution of an eigenvalue problem. Th is analysis is illustrated through two examples: (I) wrinkling of a we b induced by nearly uniform normal edge tension; (II) wrinkling of a w eb induced by uniform normal tension distributed over a section of the edge. Predictions of a wrinkling using membrane theory are compared t o those obtained with the current web theory. The contribution of smal l flexural stiffness to the prediction of the condition of wrinkling i s shown to be substantial.