Axially moving plates are of the technological importance and are present in various industrial applications. Band-saw blades, paper and plastic sheets in process and steel strip in a thin steel sheet production line are some of these applications. In the thesis, the behaviour of moving plates has been studied in three fields. At first, based on dir=ltr At the second field, a semi-analytical finite strip method is extended to analyze the stability and the vibration of moving plates with arbitrary boundary conditions, intermediate supports and in-plane loads. Here, a system of linear springs is used to analyze a plate moving across point, line and local distributed supports. The finite strip method can analyze isotropic, orthotropic and symmetrically laminated composite plates. Finally, a finite element formulation is developed for nonlinear equilibrium of axially moving thin plates. Using Hamilton’s principle, the total stiffness matrix which depends on transverse displacements is obtained in the secant form. The Coriolis and the centripetal inertial forces, which influence out-of-plane and in-plane equilibria, appear in the formulation as gyroscopic and dynamic stability matrices. Although the formulation is independent of element type, an isoparametric quadrilateral superelement is adopted for the solution of examples.
