Stability — where it appears
Named by 3 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
The roof that jumps
Every stability failure in this collection so far has been a bifurcation — a straight thing discovering it can be bent. A shallow frame does something else entirely. It stays perfectly symmetric, deforms steadily, and at some point the load it can carry starts to fall while it is still moving in the direction it was pushed.
A third of what the theory promised
A column with a small crookedness reaches almost its full Euler load. A cylinder with the same relative crookedness reaches a third of its classical one, and the theory is not wrong — what separates them is the slope of the path just past the critical load, which no calculation of the critical load itself can see.
The panel that carries more after it has failed
Everywhere else in this field a critical load is where the argument ends. A thin web is the exception — it buckles visibly, in waves anybody can see, and then goes on to carry nearly twice as much again by turning itself into a truss nobody drew.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
BifurcationBucklingEquilibrium pathPost bucklingCritical loadEfficiencyGeometric nonlinearityImperfection sensitivityKnockdown factorLimit pointLoad pathLocal buckling