Abstract
This investigation is concerned with the determination of a solution to the onset of instability of elastic plate subjected to non-uniform edge loads and/or displacements using boundary element method. In this study, the in-plane stress distribution was taken to be unknown due to non-uniform external in-plane boundary loading and/or displacements. The fundamental solution which is used to solve plate bending problems was used as the weighting function in the solution to the plate buckling problem. With this approach, the resulting integral equations still retained some domain integral terms which were then converted to boundary integral terms by means of the dual reciprocity method. With the introduction of proper shape functions, the boundary integral equations were transformed into a set of simultaneous algebraic equations expressed in a standard eigenvalue matrix format. A number of examples were studied to obtain the critical load factor and the critical buckling load. Results were then compared with analytical solutions and numerical results obtained by means of the finite element method, to illustrate the accuracy and applicability of the proposed solution procedures for solving plate buckling problems.