Civil and Environmental Engineering

Don O. Brush
Professor Emeritus

Civil & Environmental Engineering
2001 Engineering III
(530) 754-9579

Prior to his retirement, Professor Brush's research interests were in the field of structural mechanics with particular emphasis on the buckling of structural shells. Classical stability analysis with its focus on the solution of eigenvalue problems was known to work well for columns but less well for flat plates, and not at all well for structural shells. In the 50's the research community began to realize that the reason for major discrepancies between theoretical and experimental buckling loads was that the behavior of real structural members with their inherent geometric imperfections is different from that of our geometrically perfect conceptual models. This evolving realization led to extensive research in this country and elsewhere into the condition of the equilibrium at the so-called bifurcation-point, whether stable or unstable, and into the postbuckling behavior of geometically perfect and imperfect structural members. His research touched on several aspects of this large problem, including the role of geometric nonlinearity in the analysis of shells of general shape, the influence of geometric imperfections on initial postbuckling behavior, and postbuckling behavior itself.