Exact buckling and vibration solutions for stepped rectangular plates

This paper is concerned with the determination of exact buckling loads and vibration frequencies of multi-stepped rectangular plates based on the classical thin (Kirchhoff) plate theory. The plate is assumed to have two opposite edges simply supported while the other two edges can take any combination of free, simply supported and clamped conditions. The proposed analytical method for solution involves the Levy method and the state-space technique. By using this analytical method, exact buckling and vibration solutions are obtained for rectangular plates having one- and two-step thickness variations. These exact solutions are extremely useful as benchmark values for researchers developing numerical techniques and software for analyzing non-uniform thickness plates.