Buckling loads of variable thickness thin isotropic plates

This work presents accurate solutions for bifurcation buckling loads of rectangular thin plates with thickness that varies in the directions parallel to the two sides. The plates are subjected to biaxial compression and various combinations of boundary conditions are considered. The calculation of the critical loads was carried out by using the extended Kantorovich method. For the resulting ordinary differential equation, an exact method for the stability analysis of compressed members with variable flexural rigidity is used. The buckling load is found as the inplane load that makes the determinant of the stiffness matrix equal zero. New, exact results are given for many cases of uni-directional and bi-directional variation in thickness. The results are very accurate and exact for cases where an exact solution is available. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.