Thick Lévy plates re-visited (Q1597824)

The paper deals with moderately thick plates, for which the transverse shear deformation (being neglected in Kirchhoff's thin-plate-theory) has to be taken into account. This is done in Reissner's and Mindlin's theories respectively, which are based, however, on different physical models. The authors restrict their investigations to rectangular plates simply supported on two opposite edges and with arbitrary boundary conditions at the remaining ones. Especially, they establish a dissimilarity between the theories of Reissner and Mindlin in terms of Kirchhoff quantities, which leads to a considerable difference in the prediction of deflection. Numerous examples are worked out numerically and confirm the theoretical findings.