Category: Physics

Summary: Finding how strongly shell stiffness disorder must align with prestress before the softest mode leaves the shell and spreads into the bulk.

Prestressed shells can concentrate soft vibrational or buckling modes near the boundary, but disorder can redirect that localization in subtle ways. This experiment asks when correlation between shell stiffness disorder and prestress bias becomes strong enough to pull the lowest mode out of the shell-confined region and into the bulk of the structure.

The model uses dense GPU eigensolves on disorder-averaged elastic operators and bisects a correlation parameter across increasing problem sizes. By holding the shell loading fixed and searching directly for the crossover, the experiment focuses on the point where shell-localized response gives way to bulk participation.

That matters because shell confinement, prestress, and disorder are often studied together only qualitatively. The experiment turns their interaction into a quantitative threshold problem for mode localization in disordered mechanical structures.

Method: GPU dense eigensolve with iterative deepening and bisection on the correlation between shell stiffness disorder and prestress bias at fixed shell loading.

What is measured: Critical disorder-correlation threshold, shell-localization fraction of the soft mode, lowest-eigenmode behavior, and threshold bracket width.