Effect of higher order modes on creep buckling of viscoelastic plate

This paper analyses the creep buckling of viscoelastic rectangular plates under axial compression with initial deflections. A standard linear viscoelastic solid model is used and the von Karman nonlinear geometry equations are introduced in the governing equations. In order to obtain an accurate solution, the deflection function is expressed as a sinusoidal series with four terms rather than only one term in the computation. For the sake of discussing the effect of higher order modes on creep buckling of viscoelastic plate, we introduce the relative error of deflection function. By computational analyses, we get the relative error of deflection function under three different loads respectively. Through computational result, we know that the relative error of deflection function is not very small, especially near the four corners of the plate. So, the effect of high order modes on creep buckling of viscoelastic plate can not be ignored.