Buckling analysis of shear deformable plates using the quadrature element method

The recently proposed weak form quadrature element method (QEM) is applied to buckling analysis of shear deformable plates. Integrals involved in the variational description a plate are evaluated first by an efficient numerical integration scheme wherein the partial derivatives at the integration points are approximated using differential quadrature analogs. In a quadrature element, neither the node pattern nor the number of nodes is fixed, being adjustable according to convergence need. Three examples are presented and comparison with finite element results is made to demonstrate the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the QEM for buckling analysis of shear deformable plates.