A non-classical third-order shear deformation plate model based on a modified couple stress theory

A non-classical third-order shear deformation plate model is developed using a modified couple stress theory and Hamilton’s principle. The equations of motion and boundary conditions are simultaneously obtained through a variational formulation. This newly developed plate model contains one material length scale parameter and can capture both the size effect and the quadratic variation of shear strains and shear stresses along the plate thickness direction. It is shown that the new third-order shear deformation plate model recovers the non-classical Reddy-Levinson beam model and Mindlin plate model based on the modified couple stress theory as special cases. Also, the current non-classical plate model reduces to the classical elasticity-based third-order shear deformation plate model when the material length scale parameter is taken to be zero. To illustrate the new model, analytical solutions for the static bending and free vibration problems of a simply supported plate are obtained by directly applying the general forms of the governing equations and boundary conditions of the model. The numerical results show that the deflection and rotations predicted by the new plate model are smaller than those predicted by its classical elasticity-based counterpart, while the natural frequency of the plate predicted by the former is higher than that by the latter. It is further seen that the differences between the two sets of predicted values are significant when the plate thickness is small, but they are diminishing with increasing plate thickness.