Sensitivity of Buckling Loads and Vibration Frequencies of Plates

SUMMARY The paper deals with the efficient calculation of derivatives of buckling loads and vibration frequencies of plates with respect to stiffness and initial strain parameters. The direct approach for these calculations requires the sensitivity of the prebuckling field which is costly to calculate when the number of parameters is large. Instead, an adjoint method is presented which requires the solution of a single adjoint field. Examples are presented using a general purpose finite element program.