Buckling of Rectangular Plates with Tapered Thickness

A power series method with the use of a coordinate transformation has been developed to solve analytically the buckling problem of uniaxially compressed rectangular plates with linearly tapered thickness. The compressed edges are simply supported and the unloaded edges may be arbitrarily restrained, e.g., simply supported, clamped, or free. Accurate buckling loads with rapid convergence are obtained in comparison with other approximate solution methods. The influences of thickness variation, plate aspect ratios, and boundary conditions on the buckling load are shown graphically. The buckling load is highly dependent on the thickness variation. The present exact method is a general one applicable to the buckling and free vibration of the rectangular plates with various thickness variations, although limited to rectangular plates simply supported on two opposite edges.