Buckling of Laminated Composite and Sandwich Plates Using Radial Basis Function Collocations

In this paper, buckling analysis of isotropic, orthotropic, laminated composite and sandwich plates utilizing trigonometric shear deformation theory and meshless method based on the finite point formulation using thin plate, polynomial and inverse multiquadric radial basis function is presented. The convergence of the present method is studied for isotropic and laminated composite plates for different radial basis functions with optimal value of shape parameter. Numerical examples of laminated and sandwich plates subjected to various types of in-plane loads are solved to demonstrate accuracy and applicability of present method. Several new results for variety of composite and sandwich plates are presented. The present results are observed to be in good agreement with those available in literature. The effects of orthotropy ratio of material, span to thickness ratio, number of layers, core thickness and lamination scheme on the critical load of plates are also presented.