Elastic-Plastic Response of Clamped Square Plates Subjected to Repeated Quasi-Static Uniform Pressure

In this paper, an elastic-plastic analytical method is proposed to predict the cyclic deformation of the fully clamped square plates made of elastic-perfectly plastic material under repeated quasi-static uniform pressure. The whole process can be divided into the loading and unloading phases. The loading phase is formulated as three separate regimes: the elastic regime, the mixed elastic-plastic regime and the fully plastic regime. Unloading from a status in each phase is modeled as an elastic process. The total and elastic strain energies are characterized by the loading and unloading paths together with the displacement profiles, respectively. It is theoretically revealed that the elastic strain energy and the structural stiffness of the plate increase with the increasing transverse deflection. In addition, the effect of material elasticity is highlighted in the scenario of repeated loadings. The theoretical results are validated against the numerical simulations conducted by the commercial software ABAQUS. It is shown that the proposed elastic-plastic theoretical model has reasonable accuracy and can be employed to predict pressure-deflection relationship for this class of problems.