Bifurcation Analysis of a Class of Parametrized Two-Point Boundary Value Problems

Summary.

In this paper, we study the solution manifold M of a class of nonlinear parametrized two-point boundary value problems. Typical representatives of this class are the shell equations of Bauer, Reiss, Keller [2] and Troger, Steindl [29]. The boundary value problems are formulated as an abstract operator equation T(x,λ)=0 in appropriate Banach spaces. By exploiting the equivariance of T , we obtain detailed information about the structure of M. Moreover, we show how these theoretical results can be used to compute efficiently interesting parts of M with numerical standard techniques. Finally, we present numerical results for the shell equations given in [2] and [29].