ABSTRACT
The bifurcation/buckling analysis in Chapter 2 has dealt mainly with simple cases where the equilibrium paths can be obtained in explicit analytic forms. This chapter introduces numerical analysis methods for tracing equilibrium paths of nonlinear equilibrium equations of a multi-degree-of-freedom system. The load control method, the displacement control method, and the arc-length method for path tracing are presented. During the path tracing, the locations of critical points are identified by the eigenanalysis of the Jacobian matrix of the governing equation (Chapter 2). Bifurcating solutions are obtained in Chapter 4 using the so-called branch switching procedure. The procedures presented in this chapter and Chapter 4 are used in numerical bifurcation analysis in the remainder of this book.
