Small scale effect on the thermal buckling of orthotropic arbitrary straight-sided quadrilateral nanoplates embedded in an elastic medium

As a first endeavor, the small scale effect on the thermal buckling characteristic of orthotropic arbitrary straight-sided quadrilateral nanoplates embedded in an elastic medium is investigated. The surrounding elastic medium is modeled as the two-parameter elastic foundation. The formulation is derived using the classical plate theory (CPT) in conjunction with the nonlocal elasticity theory. The solution procedure is based on the transformation of the governing equations from physical domain to computational domain and then discretization of the spatial derivatives by employing the differential quadrature method (DQM) as an efficient and accurate numerical tool. The fast rate of convergence of the method is shown and the results are compared against existing results in literature. Then, the influence of small scale parameter in combination with the elastic medium parameters, geometrical shape and the boundary conditions on the thermal buckling load of the nanoplates is investigated.