ON THE NONAXISYMMETRIC LOADING OF NONHOMOGENEOUS ANNULAR PLATES OF VARIABLE THICKNESS

In this paper, the stepped reduction method is used to find general so lutions for the nonaxisymmetric bending of arbitrary axisymmetric nonh omogeneous annular plates of variable thickness under an arbitrary non axisymmetric temperature field and an arbitrary nonaxisymmetric distri buted load. In spite of a large number of steps, eventually only two s imultaneous algebraic linear equations with two unknowns have to be so lved. As an example, the bending of a circular plate, whose solution i s known is carried out by the proposed approach, and it is shown that results obtained by the proposed method compare well with previous sol utions obtained by other methods and hence prove the accuracy of the p roposed method.