Buckling and Free Vibration Behavior of an Isotropic Plate Under Nonuniform Thermal Load

This paper presents numerical simulation studies on buckling and free vibration characteristics of isotropic plates under arbitrarily varying temperature distributions using finite element method (FEM). First the critical buckling temperature is obtained, followed by modal analysis considering pre-stress due to the thermal field in the plate, with the critical buckling temperature as a parameter. It is found that anti-nodal position of the fundamental buckling mode appears away/near to the free edge when the free edge is exposed to minimum/maximum temperature of the variation. The nodal and anti-nodal lines of free vibration modes moves towards the high temperature exposed plate and nodal lines becomes a nodal area for longer plates.