Elastic/plastic buckling of a composite flat plate subjected to uniform edge compression

A theoretical approach, based on the plastic theory, has been developed for studying the elastic/plastic buckling behavior of a simply supported rectangular anisotropic plate subjected to edge compression. The said approach was employed to determine the critical buckling stresses of three different types of fiber reinforced composite plates, namely, carbon epoxy, glass epoxy and boron aluminum plates. Since the proposed approach is for a preliminary prediction of critical buckling loads of composite plates, the results obtained are deemed acceptable compared with those obtained by other authors experimentally.