Bending Solutions for Inhomogeneous and Laminated Elastic Plates

A procedure has been developed in previous papers for constructing exact solutions of the equations of linear elasticity in a thick plate of inhomogeneous isotropic linearly elastic material in which the elastic moduli depend in any specified manner on a coordinate normal to the plane of the plate. The essential idea is that any solution of the classical thin plate or classical laminate theory equations (which are two-dimensional theories) generates, by straightforward substitutions, a solution of the three-dimensional elasticity equations for the homogeneous material. Recently this theory has been formulated in terms of functions of a complex variable. It was shown that the displacement and stress fields in the inhomogeneous material could be expressed in terms of four complex potentials that are analytic functions of the complex variable ζ = x + iy in the mid-plane of the plate. However, the analysis performed so far applies only to the case of a plate with traction-free upper and lower faces. The present paper extends these solutions to the case where the plate is bent by a pressure distribution applied to a face.