Buckling of elliptical plates under uniform pressure

The buckling of elliptical plates under uniform compression has so far been studied for clamped edges. Prompted by the lack of studies on such plate shape, this paper attempts to provide further new buckling results for elliptical plates without and with internal line/curved supports. The recently developed pb-2 Rayleigh-Ritz method was used for the analysis. The method views the entire elliptical plate as a single supercontinuum element, even with the presence of complicated internal curved supports, by incorporating the support equations into the Ritz function. As such, there are no discretization or boundary and internal support losses, as are usually associated with most discretization methods. Buckling loads are graphically presented for simply supported and clamped plates. Simple buckling formulas for simply supported and clamped plates are also proposed. © ASCE.