Plastic Buckling of Simply Supported Compressed Plates

Abstract

An investigation was made to ascertain the validity of various theories for the plastic buckling of compressed simply supported plates by means of local-instability tests of drawn square tubes of l4B-T6 aluminum alloy. The results obtained were in excellent agreement with Stowell's unified theory for the plastic buckling of columns and plates (NACA TN No. l5456). This agreement, in addition to that previously obtained for columns and flanges, is considered a satisfactory experimental verification of this theory which is based on a deformation theory of plasticity. Two other plastic buckling theories of the deformation type and the empirical secant-modulus method also gave a close correlation with the test results, but a plastic buckling theory of the flow type showed a lack of agreement.