Effect of Through Stationary Edge and Center Cracks on Static Buckling Strength of Thin Plates under Uniform Axial Compression

Abstractthin plate structures are more widely used in many engineering applications as one of thestructural members. generally, buckling strength of thin shell structures is the ultimate loadcarrying capacity of these structures. the presence of cracks in a thin shell structure canconsiderably affect its load carrying capacity. hence, in this work, static buckling strength of athin square plate with a centre or edge crack under axial compression has been studied usinggeneral purpose finite element analysis software ansys. sensitivity of static buckling load of aplate with a centre or a edge crack for crack length variation and its vertical and horizontalorientations have been investigated. eigen buckling analysis is used to determine the staticbuckling strength of perfect and cracked thin plates. first, bifurcation buckling loads of a perfectthin plate with its mode shapes from fe eigen buckling analysis are compared with analyticalsolution for validating the fe models. from the analysis of the cracked thin plates, it is found thatvertical cracks are more dominant than horizontal cracks in reducing buckling strength of the thinplates. further, it is also found that as the crack length increases, buckling strength decreases.