The local buckling coefficient for orthotropic structural sections

Abstract

The local buckling of structural sections composed of isotropic plate elements is well documented. It is the purpose of this paper to extend this work to include sections composed of orthotropic plates. It has been shown that the buckling behaviour of single orthotropic plates with certain boundary conditions can be related to that of an equivalent isotropic plate in terms of a single parameter involving the principal plate rigidities. It is proposed to investigate whether this principle may also be applied to the structural buckling problem.It has been shown that simple approximations to the deflected form of buckled plates can be used to give fast and reasonably accurate results for the plate buckling problem using an energy method. If these simple deflection functions are used in an energy analysis for structural sections then large errors may be introduced.