Buckling of Orthotropic Plates under Various Inplane Loads

Abstract

When a laminated composite plate is subjected to a compressive edge force lying in the plane of the plate, failure can occur by buckling at a stress below the strength of the material. Critical buckling loads of orthotropic plates ate usually calculated using the analytical solutions which are based on the assumption of uniform end loads, despite the fact that real structures are subjected to variious non-uniform inplane loads. This paper examines the buckling behavior of the orthotropic plates under non-uniform inplane loads with different boundary conditions (all edges simply supproted, two loaded edges clamped and others simply supported, and all edge clamped) using the finite element method(FEM). Numerical results show that the existing formulas for buckling load based on the uniform load assumption leads to overestimation of buckling loads.