Nonlinear buckling formulations and imperfection models for shear deformable plates by the boundary element method

Abstract

This paper presents a nonlinear buckling analysis of shear deformable plates. Two models of imperfections are introduced: small uniform transverse loads and distributed transverse loads, according to the number of half-waves indicated by the eigenvectors from linear elastic buckling analysis. A simple numerical algorithm is presented to analyze the problems. Numerical examples with different geometries, loading and boundary conditions are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the formulation.