Effects of lateral loads and constraints on buckling of cracked thin plates under compressive edge loads

Critical buckling load is important in investigation of behaviors of thin plates or shells. The presence of cracks in these structures can affects their safety factor with respect to the common modes of failure such as buckling. Some analytical solutions were obtained for un-cracked plates with different boundary conditions. Their numerical results have good agreement with these solutions. In this paper, we also studied the effects of lateral loads and constraints on the critical buckling load of cracked plates under axial compression, experimentally and numerically. Effects of length and orientation of cracks are investigated in presence of the lateral loads. Finally, tests data are compared with the results of numerical calculations.