Buckling of orthotropic plates under various inplane loads

When a laminated composite plate is subjected to a compressive edge force lying in the plane of the plate, failure can occur by buckling at a stress below the strength of the material. Critical buckling loads of orthotropic plates are usually calculated using the analytical solutions which are based on the assumption of uniform end loads, despite the fact that real structures are subjected to various non-uniform inplane loads. This paper examines the buckling behavior of the orthotropic plates under non-uniform inplane loads with different boundary conditions (all edges simply supported, two loaded edges clamped and others simply supported, andall edges clamped) using the finite element method (FEM). Numerical results show that the existing formulas for buckling load basedon the uniform load assumption leads to overestimation of buckling loads.