Deflection and stress-resultants of axisymmetric mindlin plates in terms of corresponding Kirchhoff solutions

The Kirchhoff plate theory, when used for the analysis of bending of plates that are relatively thick, underpredicts the deflections. This is because it does not account for the effect of transverse shear deformation which becomes significant in thick plates. A more refined plate theory proposed by Mindlin allows for this shear deformation effect by relaxing the condition that the normal to the plate midsurface must remain normal to the deformed midsurface. In this paper, new exact relationships are presented between the Kirchhoff and Mindlin solutions for deflection and stress-resultants for axisymmetric plates under general rotationally symmetric loading. These relationships enable engineers and designers to obtain readily the Mindlin solutions, of such loaded axisymmetric plates, from the abundantly available Kirchhoff solutions. Thus, the task of obtaining solutions from complicated shear deformable plate analysis using the Mindlin theory may be avoided.