Local Buckling of Orthotropic Plates on Elastic Supports Using Spline Finite Strip Method

The prediction of local stability of thin plates under compression has become increasingly important in structural design.
Numerical methods are employed to overcome the difficulties of exact solution for partial differential equations of plate’s stability. Spline Finite Strip Method is one of these numerical methods and different elastic supports attached to the plate may be handled using this method. In the present paper, local buckling of orthotropic plates resting on elastic supports are studied and results are compared with known solutions. It is shown that rapid convergence of the solution is obtained.
Local buckling coefficients of plates are calculated for various effective parameters. The optimum position of the elastic supports with specific stiffness is proposed in order to maximize the local buckling coefficients for plates subjected to in-plane loading.