Buckling, a form of failure happened to plated structures, is investigated in this study. The main focus is to investigate the effects of thickness of the plates having through-thickness holes on buckling when the plate is subjected to in-plane compression. Plates having length of 200mm and width of 100mm are chosen to have thickness in range from 0.50mm to 10mm. Two holes of diameters of 20mm are implemented in plates. The finite element procedure using ABAQUS is applied for analyses. Then using the Gerard and Becker equation compressive buckling coefficients, Kc, are calculated and presented to enable engineers to calculate buckling load for the desired plate with holes in specific dimension. In order to generalize the obtained results, verification analysis has been performed by taking plates having different dimensions from the original ones used in this study. The verification showed the capability of buckling coefficients to predict buckling stresses of plates in various dimensions.

The structures with many perforated openings are widely used as a load-carrying element in the fields of civil engineering works, top slab of prestressed concrete reactor vessel, petrochemical industries and the like. Perforated concrete plates are usually thick. Therefore, the effect of transverse shear deformation is not negligible. This paper describes a new analytical method of perforated plates combining both the finite element method for effective elastic constants and the usual method in solving orthotropic plate with transverse shear deformation.