An analytic method of studying the nonlinearly elastic equilibrium of a rectangular plate of variable thickness under bending

Abstract

We propose an approximate analytic method of solving three-dimensional boundary-value problems of the physically nonlinear theory of elasticity for thick rectangular plates of variable thickness subject to a transverse load. The method is used to seek a solution of this problem in the form of double power series in small dimensionless parameters. In arbitrary approximation the original problem is reduced to a sequence of linear inhomogeneous boundary-value problems for plates of constant thickness.