DETERMINATION OF THE BUCKLING LOADS OF IRREGULARLY SHAPED PLATES USING A NEW DESIGN APPROACH

摘要

Although elastic buckling has been researched for decades there is still a need to develop fast and comprehensive procedures that will reduce product design time especially during the pre-sizing stage. This paper presents a novel equation and parameters for the buckling analysis of plates that accounts for the interaction of geometry parameters, boundary conditions and different load distributions. The method covers geometrical plate shapes such as triangular, trapezoidal, and slightly curved plates. In the place of classical methods the procedure combines a number of concepts in a novel heuristic manner to achieve a comprehensive solution.The procedure extends the Euler column buckling boundary condition coefficients to different plate edge boundary condition combinations. Geometry parameters reflect the combined effect of plate aspect ratio and the number of buckle waves. A load parameter introduces a factor that allows the effect of different load distributions to be included in the equation. The method is tested for flat plates of different planar shapes and for slightly curved plates with cylindrical geometries. Eighteen combinations of free, simple support and clamped edge boundary conditions are considered together with uniform and linearly varying edge stress loading conditions. The results are compared with analytical and finite element analyses. (C) 2019 by The Hong Kong Institute of Steel Construction All rights reserved.