Buckling analysis of moderately thick rectangular plates using coupled displacement field method

Abstract

A simple and efficient coupled displacement field method is developed to study the buckling load parameters of the moderately thick rectangular plates. This method has been successfully applied to study the same for the Timoshenko beams. A single term trigonometric admissible displacement field is assumed for one of the variables, say, the total rotations (in both X, Y directions). Making use of the coupling equations, the spatial variation for the remaining lateral displacement field is derived in terms of the total rotations. The coupled displacement field method makes the energy formulation to contains half the number of unknown independent coefficients, in the case of a rectangular plate, contrary to the conventional Rayleigh-Ritz method. The expressions for the non-dimensional buckling load parameters of the moderately thick rectangular plates with all the edges simply supported are derived. The numerical values of these parameters obtained using the coupled displacement field method match very well with open literature demonstrating the effectiveness of the coupled displacement field method.