To investigate the buckling and post buckling behaviors of elastic thin plate under frictionless unilateral restraint, enduring the coupling action of lognitudinal and transverse loads, the principle of minimum potential energy and variational method are used and series functions with unknown coefficients are taken as trial functions of functional to solve the large deflection and non linear bending problem of a thin plate and find relation curves between deflection of plate and loads. The proposed method can capture the buckling and post buckling behaviors of a thin plate in different geometrical and load boundary conditions. The analysis confirms that there occur snap and bifurcation behaviors in the post buckling stage of the plate. And these results show the validity of the variational method for solving buckling problems of thin plate.
