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Bending of plates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bending of plates or plate bending refers to the deflection of a plate

perpendicular to the plane of the plate under the action of external forces and
moments. The amount of deflection can be determined by solving the
differential equations of an appropriate plate theory. The stresses in the plate can
be calculated from these deflections. Once the stresses are known, failure
theories can be used to determine whether a plate will fail under a given load.

Contents
1 Bending of Kirchhoff-Love plates
2 Circular Kirchhoff-Love plates
Bending of an edge clamped circular plate under the
action of a transverse pressure. The left half of the
plate shows the deformed shape while the right half
shows the undeformed shape. This calculation was
performed using Ansys.

2.1 Clamped edges

3 Rectangular Kirchhoff-Love plates
3.1 Sinusoidal load
3.2 Navier solution
3.2.1 Uniform load
3.3 Levy solution
3.3.1 Moments along edges
3.3.2 Uniform and symmetric moment load
3.4 Cylindrical plate bending
3.4.1 Simply supported plate with axially fixed ends
4 Bending of thick Mindlin plates
4.1 Governing equations
4.2 Simply supported rectangular plates
5 Bending of Reissner-Stein cantilever plates
6 See also
7 References

Bending of Kirchhoff-Love plates

In the KirchhoffLove plate theory for plates the governing equations
are[1]

and

In expanded form,

and
Forces and moments on a flat plate.

where

is an applied transverse load per unit area, the thickness of the plate is

, the stresses are

, and

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The quantity

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has units of force per unit length. The quantity

For isotropic, homogeneous, plates with Young's modulus

where

has units of moment per unit length.

and Poisson's ratio

these equations reduce to[2]

is the deflection of the mid-surface of the plate.

In rectangular Cartesian coordinates,

Circular Kirchhoff-Love plates

The bending of circular plates can be examined by solving the governing equation with appropriate boundary conditions. These
solutions were first found by Poisson in 1829. Cylindrical coordinates are convenient for such problems.
The governing equation in coordinate-free form is

In cylindrical coordinates

For symmetrically loaded circular plates,

, and we have

Therefore, the governing equation is

If

and

where

are constant, direct integration of the governing equation gives us

are constants. The slope of the deflection surface is

For a circular plate, the requirement that the deflection and the slope of the deflection are finite at
.

implies that

Clamped edges
For a circular plate with clamped edges, we have

and

at the edge of the plate (radius ). Using these

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boundary conditions we get

The in-plane displacements in the plate are

The in-plane strains in the plate are

The in-plane stresses in the plate are

For a plate of thickness

, the bending stiffness is

and we have

The moment resultants (bending moments) are

The maximum radial stress is at

where

and

. The bending moments at the boundary and the center of the plate are

Rectangular Kirchhoff-Love plates

For rectangular plates, Navier in 1820 introduced a simple method for finding the displacement and stress when a plate is simply
supported. The idea was to express the applied load in terms of Fourier components, find the solution for a sinusoidal load (a single
Fourier component), and then superimpose the Fourier components to get the solution for an arbitrary load.

Sinusoidal load
Let us assume that the load is of the form

Here

is the amplitude,

is the width of the plate in the -direction, and

Since the plate is simply supported, the displacement

zero at
and
, and
is zero at

and

is the width of the plate in the -direction.

along the edges of the plate is zero, the bending moment

.

is

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If we apply these boundary conditions and solve the plate equation, we get the solution

Where D is the flexural rigidity

Analogous to flexural stiffness EI.[3] We can calculate the stresses and strains in the
plate once we know the displacement.
For a more general load of the form

where

and

are integers, we get the solution

Bending of a rectangular plate under the

action of a distributed force per unit
area.

Navier solution
Let us now consider a more general load

where

. We can break this load up into a sum of Fourier components such that

is an amplitude. We can use the orthogonality of Fourier components,

to find the amplitudes

. Thus we have, by integrating over ,

If we repeat the process by integrating over , we have

Therefore,

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Now that we know

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, we can just superpose solutions of the form given in equation (1) to get the displacement, i.e.,

Uniform load
Consider the situation where a uniform load is applied on the plate, i.e.,

. Then

Now

We can use these relations to get a simpler expression for

Since
simpler expression for

[ so
when both

] when
and

and

are even, we can get an even

are odd:

Plugging this expression into equation (2) and keeping in mind that only odd terms contribute to the displacement, we have

The corresponding moments are given by

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The stresses in the plate are

Stress (
mm,

mm,

GPa, and

under a load

kPa. The red line represents the bottom of the

Levy solution
Another approach was proposed by Levy in 1899. In this case we start with an assumed form of the displacement and try to fit the
parameters so that the governing equation and the boundary conditions are satisfied.
Let us assume that

For a plate that is simply supported at

and
, the boundary conditions are
boundary condition is equivalent to
(verify). The goal is to find
conditions at
and
and, of course, the governing equation

and
. The moment
such that it satisfies the boundary
.

Moments along edges

Let us consider the case of pure moment loading. In that case
and
has to satisfy
working in rectangular Cartesian coordinates, the governing equation can be expanded as

Plugging the expression for

. Since we are

in the governing equation gives us

or

This is an ordinary differential equation which has the general solution

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where
solution has the form

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are constants that can be determined from the boundary conditions. Therefore the displacement

Let us choose the coordinate system such that the boundaries of the plate are at
and
(and not
and
). Then the moment boundary conditions at the

(same as before) and at

boundaries are

where
are known functions. The solution can be found by applying these boundary conditions. We can show that for
the symmetrical case where

and

we have

where

Similarly, for the antisymmetrical case where

we have

We can superpose the symmetric and antisymmetric solutions to get more general solutions.
Uniform and symmetric moment load
For the special case where the loading is symmetric and the moment is uniform, we have at

The resulting displacement is

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Bending stress (

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Transverse shear stress (

rm bending moment along the edges

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and

. The bending stress

is along the bottom surface of the plate. The transverse

where

The bending moments and shear forces corresponding to the displacement

are

The stresses are

Cylindrical plate bending

Cylindrical bending occurs when a rectangular plate that has dimensions
, where
and the thickness is small,
is subjected to a uniform distributed load perpendicular to the plane of the plate. Such a plate takes the shape of the surface of a
cylinder.

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Simply supported plate with axially fixed ends

For a simply supported plate under cylindrical bending with edges that are free to rotate but have a fixed
solutions can be found using the Navier and Levy techniques.

. Cylindrical bending

Bending of thick Mindlin plates

For thick plates, we have to consider the effect of through-the-thickness shears on the orientation of the normal to the mid-surface
after deformation. Mindlin's theory provides one approach for find the deformation and stresses in such plates. Solutions to
Mindlin's theory can be derived from the equivalent Kirchhoff-Love solutions using canonical relations.[4]

Governing equations
The canonical governing equation for isotropic thick plates can be expressed as[4]

where is the applied transverse load, is the shear modulus,

thickness,
, is the shear correction factor,

is the bending rigidity, is the plate

is the Young's modulus, is the Poisson's ratio, and

In Mindlin's theory, is the transverse displacement of the mid-surface of the plate and the quantities
and
of the mid-surface normal about the
and -axes, respectively. The canonical parameters for this theory are
The shear correction factor usually has the value
.

are the rotations

and
.

The solutions to the governing equations can be found if one knows the corresponding Kirchhoff-Love solutions by using the
relations

where
is the displacement predicted for a Kirchhoff-Love plate,
function that satisfies the Laplace equation,
, and

is a biharmonic function such that

is a

Simply supported rectangular plates

For simply supported plates, the Marcus moment sum vanishes, i.e.,

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In that case the functions

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vanish, and the Mindlin solution is related to the corresponding Kirchhoff solution by

Bending of Reissner-Stein cantilever plates

Reissner-Stein theory for cantilever plates[5] leads to the following coupled ordinary differential equations for a cantilever plate with
concentrated end load
at
.

and the boundary conditions at

are

Solution of this system of two ODEs gives

where

. The bending moments and shear forces corresponding to the displacement

are

The stresses are

If the applied load at the edge is constant, we recover the solutions for a beam under a concentrated end load. If the applied load is a

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linear function of , then

See also
Bending
Infinitesimal strain theory
KirchhoffLove plate theory
Linear elasticity
MindlinReissner plate theory
Plate theory
Stress (mechanics)
Stress resultants
Structural acoustics
Vibration of plates

References
1. ^ Reddy, J. N., 2007, Theory and analysis of elastic plates and shells, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis.
2. ^ Timoshenko, S. and Woinowsky-Krieger, S., (1959), Theory of plates and shells, McGraw-Hill New York.
3. ^ Cook, R. D. et al., 2002, Concepts and applications of finite element analysis, John Wiley & Sons
4. ^ a b Lim, G. T. and Reddy, J. N., 2003, On canonical bending relationships for plates, International Journal of Solids and Structures, vol.
40, pp. 3039-3067.
5. ^ E. Reissner and M. Stein. Torsion and transverse bending of cantilever plates. Technical Note 2369, National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics,Washington, 1951.

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Categories: Continuum mechanics

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