Buckling of rectangular functionally graded material plates subjected to nonlinearly distributed in-plane edge loads

In this paper, the buckling behavior of functionally graded material (FGM) rectangular plates subjected to pin loads, partial uniform loads and parabolic loads is studied using the mesh-free method based on the radial basis function. The proposed mesh-free method approximates displacements based on scattered nodes, thus it can avoid the disadvantages that arise in the finite element method (FEM) from the use of elements. Variational forms of the system equations for the calculation of non-uniform prebuckling stress distribution and buckling loads of the plate are established. Two-step solution procedures are implemented. First the non-uniform prebuckling stresses are obtained based on a two-dimensional (2D) elastic plane stress problem. Then buckling loads of plates with the predetermined non-uniform prebuckling stresses are calculated based on Mindlin's plate assumption. Selected numerical examples are presented to validate the proposed mesh-free method.