HE purpose of the present study is to develop a simple and sufficiently accurate method which deals with the analysis of buckling of viscoelastic plates of arbitrary geometry. The method developed by Mazumdar1)2 has earlier been used by the authors3'4 for a wide class of problems of viscoelastic materials. In the present paper, the method is used to solve the problem of buckling of viscoelastic plates for a large class of in-plane forces and boundary conditions, and in particular the cases of a clamped rectangular plate and a clamped semicircular plate are examined. Contents Consider a plate of viscoelastic material with the usual simplifying linearizing assumptions. The plate is acted on by a time-dependent load q(x,y,r) in the downward z direction and by in-plane forces Nx, Ny, Nxy, functions of x,y, and r, in the oxy plane. At a particular instant of time r, the intersections between the deflected surface of the plate and the parallels z-constant yield contours which, after projection onto the oxy plane, yield a family of nonintersecti ng closed curves, known as contour lines of equal deflection. Consider a portion of the plate bounded by a contour curve u (x,y )= constant at any instant of time r. Summing the tractions around the boundary and the forces on the area Qw inside the boundary, the following static equation is obtained. where