A SEMINUMERICAL METHOD FOR BUCKLING OF SECTOR PLATES

A semianalytical-seminumerical method of solution is presented in this paper for the buckling problem of simply supported sector plates subj ected to in-plane pressure along the straight edges. A set of analytic al solutions of prebuckling in-plane stresses are first suggested here for the plane-stress problem of sector plates. Based on the analytica l solutions, the critical load of the out-of-plane buckling is derived using a seminumerical method. The basic functions in the angular dire ction are chosen as the eigenfunctions for the simply supported beam. The resulting ordinary differential equation is solved by a one-dimens ional finite difference technique. Comparison of results was possible for the specific case when the sector plate approaches a rectangular p late, and the results are in excellent agreement with existing ones.