Advanced Theory of

Elasticity

Buckling of thin plates

Student:
Lamyaa Mohsin

FILS, M I, STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING

In the calculation of critical values of forces applied in the

middle place of a plate, the same methods as in the case of
compressed bars can be used.
The equation for the buckled plate is

The simplest case is obtained when the forces are

constant throughout the plate.

= the smallest value of the forces for which buckling occurs

Buckling of Simply Supported Rectangular Plates

Uniformly Compressed in One Direction.
Assume that a rectangular plate (Fig. 1) is compressed in
its middle plane by forces uniformly distributed along
sides x = 0 and x = a.
The Navier solution for the deflection way may be used:

The strain energy of bending in this case is

The work done by the

compressive forces during
buckling of the plate, will be
Thus Eq. (2), for determining the
critical value of compressive
forces, becomes

the same reasoning as in the case of

By
compressed bars it can be shown that expression
(d) becomes a minimum if all coefficients , except
one, are taken equal to zero. Then

It is obvious that the smallest value of will be obtained by taking n equal to 1. The physical
meaning of this is that a plate buckles in such a way that there can be several half-waves in the
direction of compression but only half-wave in the perpendicular direction.
The first factor in this expression
represents the Euler load for a
strip of unit width and length a.
The critical load, with m = 1, in
expression (e), can be finally
represented in the following
form:
For a plate of a given width
the critical value of the load
is smallest if the plate is
square. In this case

For other proportions of the plate the

expression (g) can be represented in
the form

in which k is a numerical factor, the magnitude of

which depends on the ratio a/b. this factor is
presented in Fig. (2) by the curve marked m = 1.

Let us assume now that the plate buckles into two

half-waves and that the deflection surface is
represented by the expression

or calculating the critical load we can again use Eq. (g)

by substituting in it a/2 instead of a. Then

The transition from m to m + 1

half-waves evidently occurs when
the two corresponding curves in
Fig. 2 have equal ordinates, i.e.,
when
From this equation we obtain

Substituting m = 1, we obtain
At this ratio we have transition
from one to two half-waves.
By taking m = 2 we find that
transition from two to three
half-waves occurs when
From Eq. (6) the critical value of
the compressive stress is

Steel thin plate:

a = 15 m
b=5m
h =50 mm

SAP2000 Model

Mode
2