Applied Mathematics Commons^™

Supercritical And Subcritical Pitchfork Bifurcations In A Buckling Problem For A Graphene Sheet Between Two Rigid Substrates, Jake Grdadolnik

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this paper we study a model of the buckling of a sheet of graphene between two rigid substrates. We seek to understand the buckling of the sheet as the substrate separation is varied with a fixed load on each end of the sheet. We write down the expression for total energy of the system and from it derive a 2-point nonlinear boundary-value problem whose solutions are equilibrium configurations of the sheet. We cannot get an explicit solution. Instead, we perform a bifurcation analysis by using asymptotics to approximate solutions on the bifurcating branches near the bifurcation points. The bifurcating …