ABSTRACT
A plate is a body whose boundary consists of two plane surfaces, called its faces, located a small distance apart and one or more (if it has holes) prismatic lateral surfaces (see Fig. 17.1). The distance between the faces of a plate is called its thickness and is considerably smaller than its other two dimensions. The locus of the midpoints of the thickness of a plate is a plane known as its midplane. We call the closed line bounding the midplane of a plate its edges. We limit our attention to thin plates of constant thickness t. Plates are considered as thin when their thickness is less than about 1/20 of
3the smallest dimension of their midplane. As shown in Fig. 17.1, we choose the x axis 1 2normal to the midplane of the plate and the x and x axes in its midplane.
