Buckling and Post-buckling Behaviour of Plates with Holes

This paper gives details of theoretical and experimental investigations into the behaviour of simply-supported uniformly compressed square and rectangular plates with central circular holes. The theoretical analysis employs an approximate approach using a combination of Rayleigh-Ritz and finite-element methods. The experimental investigation consisted of a number of experiments on plates with hole diameters from one- to seven-tenths of the plate width. Agreement between experiment and theory is shown to be good at buckling. In the post-buckling range it is found that the theoretical analysis is reasonably accurate for small holes, but loses accuracy when dealing with large holes.