Buckling of Rectangular Plates With General Variation in Thickness

Abstract

A perturbation technique is employed to determine the critical buckling stress of a simply supported rectangular plate of variable thickness. The differential equation is derived for a general thickness variation. The problem of bending, vibration, buckling, and that of dynamic stability of a variable thickness plate can be deduced from this equation. The problem of buckling of a rectangular plate with simply supported edges and having general variation in thickness in one direction is considered in detail. The solution is presented in a form such as can be easily adopted for computing critical buckling stress, once the thickness variation is known. The numerical values obtained from the present analysis are in excellent agreement with the published results.