Elastic and inelastic local buckling of stiffened plates subjected to non-uniform compression using the Galerkin method

A solution for the elastic and inelastic local buckling of flat rectangular plates with centerline boundary conditions subjected to non-uniform in-plane compression and shear stress is presented. The loaded edges are simply supported, the longitudinal edges may have any boundary conditions and the centerline is simply supported with a variable rotational stiffness. The Galerkin method, an effective method for solving differential equations, is applied to establish an eigenvalue problem. In order to obtain plate buckling coefficients, combined trigonometric and polynomial functions that satisfy the boundary conditions are used. The method is programmed, and several numerical examples including elastic and inelastic local buckling, are presented to illustrate the scope and efficacy of the procedure. The variation of buckling coefficients with aspect ratio is presented for various stress gradient ratios. The solution is applicable to stiffened plates and the flange of the I-shaped beams that are subjected to biaxial bending or combined flexure and torsion and shear stresses, and is important to estimate the reduction in elastic buckling capacity due to stress gradient.