Buckling of moderately thick rectangular composite plates subjected to partial edge compression

The objective of the present paper is to investigate the influence of partial edge compression on the critical loads of moderately thick laminated plates. Towards this, an eight node isoparametric plate element is developed. The element has five degrees of freedom per node. The computer code developed accepts two sets of boundary conditions, one for pre-buckling stress analysis and the second for stability analysis. This flexibility is proposed to exploit the mid-line symmetry conditions. Two types of partial edge compression, viz., (I) uniform partial edge compression near the corners and (II) uniform partial edge compression at the middle of edges are considered. The effect of percentage of loaded edge length on the critical load of thin and thick composite plates with simply supported and clamped edge conditions is studied in detail. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.