Date of Graduation

1999

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

Committee Chair

George Trapp

Abstract

The biharmonic equation is used to model the deflections arising in two dimensional rectangular orthotropic symmetric laminate plates. The plate can be subjected to external perpendicular forces and one is interested in the resulting deflections. Various boundary conditions can be applied to the problem. The edges can be simply supported, clamped, or free. In this work, an automatic procedure is defined which produces the difference equations for each edge boundary case. The procedure is illustrated, using MATLAB, with numerical results for problems with and without exact analytical solutions.

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