“…In particular, the following questions arose, which are important for applications to engineering: what is the behaviour of a compressed rack under loads higher than the Euler critical value, what is the shape of the rack in this case, is it unique and stable? A number of papers (see [49], [69], [75], [96], [119], [148], [149], [161]) were concerned with these questions, considering various conditions for supporting and loading inextensible elastic rods. During the last decades the interest to elasticae has grown because of applications of the theory of flexible rods to the analysis of micro-and nanostructures in biology and nanotechnology [76], [84], [115], [151].…”