Flexural Analysis of Thick Isotropic Rectangular Plates Using Orthogonal Polynomial Displacement Functions

This paper analysed the flexural behaviour of SSSS thick isotropic rectangular plates under transverse load using the Ritz method. It is assumed that the line that is normal to the mid-surface of the plate before bending does not remain the same after bending and consequently a shear deformation function f (z) is introduced. A polynomial shear deformation function f (z) was derived for this research. The total potential energy which was established by combining the strain energy and external work was subjected to direct variation to determine the governing equations for the in – plane and out-plane displacement coefficients. Numerical results for the present study were obtained for the thick isotropic SSSS rectangular plates and comparison of the results of this research and previous work done in literature showed good convergence. However, It was also observed that the result obtained in this present study are significantly upper bound as compared with the results of other researchers who employed the higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT), first order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and classical plate theory (CPT) theories for the in – plane and out of plane displacements at span – depth ratio of 4. Also, at a span - depth ratio of and above, there was approximately no difference in the values obtained for the out of plane displacements and in-plane displacements between the CPT and the theory used in this study.