Buckling of arbitrary quadrilateral plates with intermediate supports using the Galerkin method Original Research Article

A numerical method is developed for the stability analysis of arbitrary quadrilateral-shaped elastic plates with internal supports. The procedure uses the Galerkin method in conjunction with the natural coordinates of the plate as a basis for the analysis of general plates. The method is programmed, and several numerical exaples are presented to illustrate the scope and efficacy of the procedure. Local plate buckling loads of skew, rhombic, trapezoidal and rectangular plates with intermediate line supports are obtained and, where possible, the results are compared with known solutions in the literature.