Computation of elastic buckling loads of rectangular thin plates using the extended kantorovich method

In this paper, the extended Kantorovich method proposed by Kerr is further extended to the eigenvalue problem of elastic stability of various rectangular thin plates. By taking advantage of the availability and reliability of state-of-the-art ordinary differential equation solvers, multi-term trial functions have been employed, which is a significant extension to Kerr's single term approach. As a result, the accuracy is greatly improved and some special problems that a single-term trial function fails to solve are now accommodated. A large number of numerical experiments have been carried out and the computed buckling loads are either exact or more accurate than the best known results in the literature. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.