Elastic Shear Buckling Coefficients for Oblique Plates

Oblique plates are utilized in a variety of applications in steel structures such as panel zones. As shear stresses generally act upon panel zones, it is important to evaluate the shear buckling resistance of panel zones, especially as thinner steel plates have been used in recent years. In contrast to the stability problem of rectangular plates, which has been extensively studied, the elastic buckling strengths of oblique plates are not entirely clear, even under basic stress conditions such as uniform shear stress. This study investigated the elastic shear buckling stress of oblique plates. The main goals were to examine the buckling behavior of simply and clamped supported oblique plates and propose convenient and reliable design equations to predict the elastic shear buckling coefficients. By adopting the energy method based on Timoshenko’s plate buckling theory, the influence of the geometry of the oblique plates and the direction of the shear stress were investigated. Furthermore, highly convenient design equations for elastic shear buckling coefficients were proposed. The accuracy of the proposed equation was assessed using extensive parametric studies based on the finite element method using MSC Marc software.