Analytical solution for buckling of Mindlin plates subjected to arbitrary boundary conditions

The study investigates the buckling behavior of isotropic plates subjected to axial, biaxial and pure shear loads. The effect of transverse shear deformation is taken into account by adopting the Mindlin first order shear theory. By applying the extended Kantorovich method, an exact solution is presented without any approximation on the boundary conditions. The procedure is proposed for thin, moderately thick and thick isotropic plates. The obtained results are in good agreement with those available in literature and they demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed procedure.