Nonlinear instability problems including localized plastic failure and large deformations for extreme thermo-mechanical loads

In this work we provide the theoretical formulation, discrete approximation and solution algorithm for instability problems combing geometric instability at large displacements and material instability due to softening under combined thermo-mechanical extreme loads. While the proposed approach and its implementation are sufficiently general to apply to vast majority of structural mechanics models, more detailed developments are provided for truss-bar model. Several numerical simulations are presented in order to illustrate a very satisfying performance of the proposed methodology.