In this paper, elastic-plastic buckling of a thick rectangular plate has been investigated based on both Incremental (IT) and Deformation (DT) plasticity theories. Uniform biaxial edge traction was assumed as the plate loading while simply supported as the boundary conditions. Integral uniqueness criterion has been minimized to determine the critical buckling traction. Based on Rayleigh-Ritz method, a linear combination of polynomial base functions, which satisfy the geometrical boundary conditions, has been used as the trial functions for rotations and transverse deflection. To validate the analysis, the results for the Mindlin plate theory have been compared with the previously published results and a very close agreement has been observed. Then the effects of thickness ratio, aspect ratio and also different biaxial traction ratios on the buckling traction have been investigated. The results show that for the problem considered here, very close critical buckling traction is predicted by the both Mindlin and sinusoidal plate theories. This implies that Mindlin plate theory is sufficiently accurate to predict critical buckling traction in this problem. Moreover when the loading is gradually changed from biaxial into uniaxial compression or when the thickness-ratio is increased, the difference between the two theories is also increased. Also for compression-tension loading case, the critical buckling traction predicted by deformation theory is much less than the incremental theory.

Keywords: Elastic-Plastic Buckling, Thick Rectangular Plate, Sinusoidal Higher-Order Shear Deformation Theory, Rayleigh-Ritz method

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