Plane stress theories

Abstract

Tiffen and Lowe in two recent papers (4,5) have developed exact theories for the bending and stretching of generally loaded elastic plates using the moments of the fundamental equations of infinitesimal elasticity. The two theories depend on the choice of independent variables so that a pair of functions, denoted by and are independent. The choice is correct in (4) but not in (5). This paper pro-poses a modification to the forms of the functions and in (5) and then shows that the modified forms are independent. The subsequent alteration to (5), as will be seen, involves only the biharmonic function χ Apart from a minor algebraic adjustment the rest of the theory, containing the real and complex eigenfunctions and particular integral, is preserved. It should be noted that the modified theory like the original is obtained entirely from the moment equations.