Buckling of symmetrically laminated rectangular plates with general boundary conditions – A semi analytical approach

A semi-analytical extended Kantorovich approach for the buckling analysis of symmetrically laminated rectangular plates with general boundary conditions is presented. The solution is derived as a multi-function expansion that allows the analysis of laminated plates characterized by a non-separable solution. Among these, the cases of buckling of angle-ply laminates under inplane compression and shear buckling of any type of plate are the most common ones. The formulation is based on the variational principal of total energy minimization and the iterative extended Kantorovich method. The exact element method is adopted for the solution of the resulting differential eigenvalue problem. The capabilities of the proposed approach and its applicability to buckling analysis of composite laminated plates that cannot be analyzed using the classical single-term extended Kantorovich method are demonstrated numerically. The results are compared with exact solutions (where available), and with approximate results from other numerical methods. The accuracy and convergence of the proposed approach are also discussed.