The magneto-plastic instability of a ferromagnetic beam-type plate with simple supports and small initial imperfection is analytically investigated in this paper for that the plastic deformation of the plate with a linear-strain hardening relation is considered when the plate is located in a strong uniformly distributed magnetic ?eld. After the distribution of magnetic ?elds related to the de?ected con?guration of plate is imaginably divided into two parts, i.e., one is related to the ?at plate and the other dependent on the perturbation of magnetic ?elds for which the plate con?guration changes from the ?at into the deformed state, the perturbation technique is employed to analyze the distribution of the perturbation magnetic ?elds in and out-of the magnetic medium of the ferromagnetic structure in a transverse magnetic ?eld, which leads to some analytical formulae/solutions for the magnetic ?elds and the resulting magnetic force exerted on the plate. Based on them, the magneto-plastic buckling and snapping of the plate in a transverse magnetic ?eld is discussed, and the critical magnetic ?eld is analytically formulated in terms of the parameters of geometry and material of the plate employed by solving the governing equation of the magneto-plastic plate in the applied magnetic ?eld. Further, the sensitivity of the initial imperfection on the magneto-plastic instability, expressed by an ampli?cation function, is obtained by solving the dynamic equation of de?ection of the plate after the inertial force in the transverse direction is taken into account. The results obtained show that the critical magnetic ?eld is sensitive to the plastic characteristic, e.g., hardening coe?cient, and the instability mode and de?ection of the plate are dependent on the geometrical imperfection as well.
