In the fields of engineering, nanoscience, and biomechanics, thin structural members, such as beams, plates, and shells, that are supported by an elastic medium are used in several applications. There is a possibility that these thin structures might buckle under severe loading conditions; higher-order, complicated elastic buckling modes can be found owing to the balance of rigidities between the thin members and elastic supports. In this study, we have shown a new and simple ‘power law’ relation between the critical buckling strain (or loads) and rigidity parameters in structural members supported by an elastic medium, which can be modelled as a Winkler foundation. The following structural members have been considered in this paper: i) a slender beam held by an outer elastic support under axial loading, ii) cylindrical shells supported by an inner elastic core under hydrostatic pressure (plane strain condition), and iii) complete spherical shells that are filled with an inner elastic medium.

This paper describes the combination of the method of fundamental solutions (MFS) and the dual reciprocity method (DRM) as a meshless numerical method to solve problems of thin plates resting on Winkler foundations under arbitrary loadings, where the DRM is based on the augmented polyharmonic splines constructed by splines and monomials. In the solution procedure, the arbitrary distributed loading is first approximated by the augmented polyharmonic splines (APS) and thus the desired particular solution can be represented by the corresponding analytical particular solutions of the APS. Thereafter, the complementary solution is solved formally by the MFS. In the mathematical derivations, the real coefficient operator in the governing equation is decomposed into two complex coefficient operators. In other words, the solutions obtained by the MFS-DRM are first treated in terms of these complex coefficient operators and then converted to real numbers in suitable ways. Furthermore, the boundary conditions of lateral displacement, slope, normal moment, and effective shear force are all given explicitly for the particular solutions of APS as well as the kernels of MFS. Finally, numerical experiments are carried out to validate these analytical formulas.