Elastic buckling of tapered circular plates

This paper is concerned with the elastic buckling of tapered circular plates. The study is prompted by the fact that results hitherto available are restricted to a narrow range of taper parameters and are somewhat different from each other. For the buckling analysis, a simple and yet accurate numerical method is presented. It is based on the shooting method and the Rayleigh-Ritz approach. Comprehensive generic buckling results of circular plates with linearly and parabolically varying thicknesses are generated. Comparison studies of the buckling results showed that some of the existing results were erroneous. Optimal values of taper parameters for such tapered plates are also given.