Stability of piezoelectric FGM rectangular plates subjected to non-uniformly distributed load, heat and voltage

This paper employs the element free Galerkin (EFG) method to analyze buckling of piezoelectric functionally graded material (FGM) rectangular plates subjected to non-uniformly distributed loads, heat and voltage. A two-step solution procedure is implemented. In the first step, based on a two-dimensional (2D) plane stress problem, pre-buckling stresses of plates subjected to non-uniformly distributed loads are calculated. In the second step, based on the Mindlin plate assumption, buckling load and temperature parameters of the plates are obtained using the EFG method with penalty coefficients. Numerical examples are presented to validate the proposed numerical method. Some useful results for the FGM plates are presented.