Differential cubature method: A solution technique for Kirchhoff plates of arbitrary shape Original Research Article

A treatment for bending analysis of Kirchhoff plates using the differential cubature (DC) method is presented. To the authorsʹ knowledge, this represents the first known successful application of the DC method to this problem. The plates treated are subjected to various combinations of boundary conditions and of arbitrary plate geometry. A discussion on the implementation issues is presented and several numerical test examples are included to demonstrate the applicability, efficiency and simplicity of the approximate procedures. The accuracy of the procedures is verified by direct comparing the present numerical results of different plate shapes with the existing exact analytical solutions [1] and other sources of numerical values.