non-linear analysis of viscoelastic rectangular plates subjected to in-plane compression

geometrically nonlinear governing equations for a plate with linear viscoelastic material are derived. the material model is of boltzmann superposi¬tion principle type. a third-order displacement field is used to model the shear deformation effects. for the solution of the nonlinear governing equations the dynamic relaxation (dr) iterative method together with the finite difference discretization technique is used. finally, the numerical results for the critical buckling load for simply supported edge constraints are reported. in order to justify the accuracy of the results, the elastic plate critical buckling loads are obtained and compared with the existing results. the correlations are very satisfactory. the numerical results are presented for classical plate theory (cpt), first order- shear defonmation plate theory (fsdt) and higher order- shear deformation plate theory (hsdt). in the case of thick plate the differences among the three theories are highlighted, however, for thin plate the variations are very small.