Strlengr7:
As Paddington suggested this is really confusing, and it isn’t us who are confusing the issue. So, I am adding that you seem very confused about what you are doing. If you are an engineering professional, you are doing a really poor job of defining your problem: span length and support conditions, load magnitude and its footprint, plate thickness, etc, etc. With such a basic question, so ill expressed, you should not be coming to a forum like Eng-Tips for your fundamental engineering education. We generally don’t do first and second year engineering education here. Given the nature of your question, you probably shouldn’t be doing this problem without the help of a senior engineer from your own office. Your boss should know what you know and what you don’t know, so he can help keep you out of trouble, and guide you in your learning process. If your point load is on some rectangular area in the middle of the plate, what you might be asking is what is an effective width of this plate for these spans and plate thickness and load, so that using simple beam theory, I can take a first long hand shot at this problem. But then, also study how simple beam theory might not be appropriate for a plate bending problem, and come back and tell us. BA’s suggested reading will get you a better answer, once you figure out which edges are supported, and how, and what your span lengths are.