Probing the hidden equilibrium states of a buckled beam

Buckling is a phenomenon that sees designs both utilizing it positively or trying to avoid its catastrophic consequences. Understanding what sets the critical threshold for buckling (i.e. the buckling load) is therefore of great importance. However, thin-walled structures are very defect-sensitive and are therefore hard to control and model. The often- irreversible outcome of a buckle makes experimental evaluation of the critical load challenging. Recently, it has been shown that finite-amplitude perturbations of such systems can produce a stability landscape which predicts the buckling load for a system with a dominant imperfection. Here, we show that the stability landscape can also identify new stable and unstable equilibrium modes of a real systems, and reveal the correlation structure of its defects and its true resting shape.