Buckling of laminated composite plates with elastically restrained boundary conditions

A unified solution is presented for the buckling analysis of rectangular laminated composite plates with elastically restrained edges. The plate is subjected to biaxial in-plane compression, and the boundary conditions are simulated by employing uniform distribution of linear and rotational springs at all edges. The critical values of buckling loads and corresponding modes are calculated based on classical lamination theory and using the Ritz method. The deflection function is defined based on simple polynomials without any auxiliary function. The verifications of the current study are carried out with available combinations of classic boundary conditions in the literature. Through parametric study with a wide range of spring factors with some classical as well as some not classical boundary conditions, competency of the present model of boundary conditions is proved.