Abstract: This paper presents a curvilinear boundary quadrilateral element for the problem of thin plate of bending with curvilinear boundary. A coordinate transformation of two dimensions is performed in the calculation of FEM. The introduction of an additional stiffness matrix based on the generalized variational principles results in high accuracy and less computation time. The numerical results agree with the analytical solution very well.

Key words: p-Laplacian, sign-changing weight function, Morse critical groups