Buckling of moderately thick arbitrarily shaped plates with intermediate point supports using a simple hp-cloud method

This paper presents the simple hp-cloud meshless method for the stability analysis of moderately thick plates with various shapes subjected to uniaxial and biaxial in-plane compressive and pure shear loads. To allow the effect of transverse shear deformation on the critical buckling load of the plate, the Mindlin's plate theory is employed. Simple hp-cloud method is applied for constructing the cloud shape functions and for discretization of the domain. Shepard functions are also used for the partition of unity and complete polynomials are utilized for the enrichment functions part. The simple hp-cloud method has Kronecker delta property, so contrary to most of meshless methods the essential boundary conditions can be imposed directly. Constructing the stiffness and geometry matrices leads to an eigenvalue problem that should be solved to determine the critical buckling load of the plate. Numerical results are verified against the results reported elsewhere to illustrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the present method. To show the applications of simple hp-cloud method in the buckling analysis of moderately thick plates, local buckling coefficients of various shapes of plates, rectangular, skew, trapezoidal, triangular, circular, semi-circular, hexagonal and general shape with different boundary conditions are determined. Also, local buckling coefficients of plates with point supports and intermediate support are calculated. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.