Buckling of Composite Plates With Arbitrary Boundary Conditions By A Semi-analytical Approach

A semi-analytical approach for the buckling analysis of symmetrically laminated rectangular plates under arbitrary constrains is presented. In the proposed method, the out-of-plane displacement field is assumed to be of a multiplicative form containing two vectors of functions, one being prescribed and the other to be determined, depend on separate variables. As a consequence, one may solve the equilibrium equation analytically, and obtain exact buckling loads for the biaxial compression and different boundary constrains. Several cases of plate buckling under different load combinations are studied, in order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The results obtained are compared with the existing ones, where available in analytical form, and approximate results obtained by other numerical methods.