Bending, buckling and curling of a heated elliptical plate

Abstract

This paper presents the large-deflexion analysis of an elliptical plate of lenticular section whose temperature varies linearly through its thickness. The plate may possess initial curvatures whose principal axes do not necessarily coincide with the axes of the ellipse. The analysis is exact within the spirit of large-deflexion plate theory, and embraces such phenomena as curling, asymmetrical buckling and snap-through buckling. The effect of a parabolic temperature variation in the plane of the plate is also determined.