LAUSR

A semi-analytical solution of thermal buckling and postbuckling equilibrium paths of rectangular composite plates subjected to localized thermal heating over the plate area with uniform temperature rise through its thickness is reported here. The plate is either simply supported or clamped for out-of-plane displacements and immovable for in-plane displacements. The thermal buckling of the composite plate subjected to localized thermal loading is solved in two steps as the prebuckling stress distributions within the plate are not known a priori. In the first step the explicit analytical expressions for these in-plane prebuckling stress distributions within the composite plate are developed by solving the thermoelasticity problem using Airy’s stress function. Using the computed in-plane stress distributions within the plate, the plate nonlinear stability equations are formulated using a variational principle. First-order shear deformation theory incorporating von-Kármán geometric nonlinearity is used to model the plate. The generalized differential quadrature method in conjunction with the modified Newton–Raphson method is used to solve the nonlinear governing partial differential equations for nonlinear thermal stability of composite plates. The influence of aspect ratio, area of heated region, and the boundary conditions on the critical buckling temperature and equilibrium paths are examined.