On the Nonaxisymmetric Loading of Nonhomogeneous Annular Plates of Variable Thickness

In this paper, the stepped reduction method is used to find general solutions for the nonaxisymmetric bending of arbitrary axisymmetric nonhomogeneous annular plates of variable thickness under an arbitrary nonaxisymmetric temperature field and an arbitrary nonaxisymmetric distributed load. In spite of a large number of steps, eventually only two simultaneous algebraic linear equations with two unknowns have to be solved. As an example, the bending of a circular plate, whose solution is known, is carried out by the proposed approach, and it is shown that results obtained by the proposed method compare well with previous solutions obtained by other methods and hence prove the accuracy of the proposed method.