Equilibrium Shapes of Inflated Elastic Membranes

Summary. In this paper we present an effective numerical algorithm for determining the equilibrium shapes of inflated linearly elastic membranes susceptible to wrinkling. We suppose that each membrane, initially flat, reaches its final shape at the end of a four-stage loading process corresponding to the enforcement and the subsequent removal of a fictitious antagonist plane traction acting uniformly along its entire boundary. By this way it is possible to solve with great accuracy the set of governing equilibrium equations by means of an expressly developed numerical procedure in which the membrane's tangent stiffness is always kept different from zero