The stability of cracked rectangular plate with variable thickness using phase field method

This study focuses on the investigation of the stability in a rectangular FGM plate with central crack. The plate thickness is changed linearly following the length of the plate. Using the Reissner-Mindlin first order shear deformation theory (FSDT), phase field theory and finite element method (FEM), the stability of fracture of the plate is determined. In order to ensure the reliability of the study, the obtained numerical results in this paper are compared with results reported in other publications. The work also presents the analysis of critical buckling computation for plate that have variation in thickness, the length of the crack on plate as well as the inclined angle of the crack. The numerical results show that the crack length impacts significantly to the critical buckling values of the plate, whereas the impact of inclined angle is less. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd