Shear Buckling of Thin Plates Using the Spline Collocation Method

This paper presents a highly accurate method for analyzing the critical shear buckling load of thin elastic rectangular plates. The solutions are approximated by the extended spline collocation method (SCM). Using the quintic table in place of the complex quintic B-spline functions, one can easily formulate the field equation of shear buckling loads for a thin elastic rectangular plate. Through the generalized eigenvalue analysis, the shear buckling loads and mode shapes for the plate can be determined precisely. Numerical examples are given for the critical shear buckling load of plates with various combinations of boundary conditions, aspect ratios, and uni- and bi-directional compressive/tensile loadings. The solutions obtained by the SCM are compared with those by the finite element method, the Lagrangian multiplier method, and the extended Kantorovich method under several types of boundary conditions. Compared with the other methods, the proposed SCM is not only more accurate, but also easier for computation.