PLATE BUCKLING LOADS BY THE BOUNDARY-ELEMENT METHOD

A boundary element solution of the plate buckling problem is extended and refined to accommodate any combination of loading and support cond itions. It is complemented by a similar boundary element formulation y ielding the prebuckling membrane state of stress for non-uniform distr ibutions of edge loads. Both continuous and discontinuous models of va rious orders of approximation for boundary as well as domain unknowns have been employed and their effect on the accuracy of the solution al gorithm assessed. The computer code incorporates automatic mesh genera tion schemes for both the boundary and the domain through which a wide range of plate geometries can be discretized and analysed. Further, g ains in both efficiency and accuracy are achieved by taking advantage of any support and loading symmetries and reducing the formulation to a standard eigenvalue problem. A large number of plate examples are so lved to optimize the choice of various modelling parameters and to est ablish the reliability of the proposed analysis.