Elastic bending analysis of irregular-shaped plates

An approximate method for analyzing the bending problems of irregular-shaped plates is proposed. In this paper irregular-shaped plates are such plates as plate with opening, circular plate, semi-circular plate, elliptic plate, triangular plate, skew plate, rhombic plate, trapezoidal plate or the other polygonal plates which are not uniform rectangular plates. It is shown that these irregular-shaped plates can be considered finally as a kind of rectangular plates with non-uniform thickness. An opening in a plate can be considered as an extremely thin part of the plate, and a non-rectangular plate can be translated into a circumscribed rectangular plate whose additional parts are extremely thin or thick according to the boundary conditions of the original plate. Therefore any irregular-shaped plate can be replaced by the equivalent rectangular plate with non-uniform thickness. For various types of irregular-shaped plates the convergency and accuracy of numerical solution by proposed method are investigated.