Plastic limit analysis of a clamped circular plate with unified yield criterion

This paper presents exact close form solutions of plastic limit loads of a clamped circular plate under uniformly distributed load with different loading radii. A unified yield criterion, which includes a family of piecewise linear yield criteria and the commonly adopted yield criteria such as the Tresca criterion and the maximum principal deviatoric stress criterion or the twin shear stress criterion that are its special cases, and the Mises criterion can be approximated by it, is employed in the analysis. The plastic limit loads, moment fields and velocity fields of the clamped circular plate are calculated based on the unified yield criterion. The influences of the yield criteria, the edge effects and the loading radius on the plastic limits of the clamped circular plate are investigated. Analytical results are calculated and compared. The exact close form solutions presented in this paper provide efficient approaches for obtaining plastic limit loads and the corresponding moments and velocities of the clamped circular plates. The previously derived solutions based on the Tresca and the Mises criteria are its special cases.