Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

The concept of an equivalent orthotropic material is used in evaluating the collapse loads for perforated plates. Uniformly loaded circular plates are investigated. Limit pressure solutions are obtained for both the simply supported and rigidly built-in edge conditions. Statically admissible radial and circumferential bending moment fields are found and the associated velocity fields are shown to be kinematically admissible. Numerical results are given in dimensionless form covering arbitrary plate geometries over the entire range of material orthotropy.

These solutions are quite useful in the plastic analysis and design of perforated plates used as pressure vessel heads, tube sheets, reactor core support plates and the like. Perforated plates have considerably higher effective yield strengths when subjected to equi-biaxial loading than when subjected to loading of arbitrary biaxiality and orientation with respect to the penetration pattern. Thus, the equivalent orthotropic plastic material concept is ideally suited to the analysis of such plates. The resulting limit load pressures are substantially lower than the values obtained using isotropic Tresca yield criterion based on the yield strength for equi-biaxial loading. The results are substantially higher than the values obtained using the maximum isotropic Tresca yield condition falling entirely within the orthotropic yield surface.