Thermo-mechanical buckling analysis of non-uniformly heated rectangular plates with temperature-dependent material properties

This paper examines the thermo-mechanical buckling behavior of a rectangular plate with temperature-dependent (TD) material properties exposed to non-uniform heating. The buckling analysis was performed by using the differential quadrature (DQ) method, which mainly includes three steps: (i) a two-dimensional (2D) non-linear heat transfer equation was proposed to obtain the temperature distribution in the plate considering the convective–radiative conditions on the plate surface; (ii) the in-plane stress distribution of the plate was obtained by solving the thermoelastic equilibrium equation; (iii) the critical load was determined by solving the stability equation based on the stress distribution in the previous step. The comparison study shows that the present results were in good agreement with the finite element (FE) solutions and the results reported in the literature. The effects of the surrounding temperature fields and in-plane load cases on the thermo-mechanical behavior of the plate are analyzed in detail. •Thermo-mechanical buckling of non-uniformly heated rectangular plates.•Temperature-dependent material properties.•Convective–radiative conditions.•A systematic analytical procedure based on the differential quadrature method.