TRANSVERSE VIBRATION OF PLATE STRUCTURES WITH ELASTICALLY RESTRAINED EDGES BY THE SPLINE FINITE STRIP METHOD

The newly developed spline finite strip method has been applied to det ermine the natural frequencies of plates and stiffened plates with edg ed elastically restrained against translation and rotation. The stiffe ner has been modelled so that it can be situated anywhere within the p late strip. The formulation has been generalized in such a manner that it can handle general shaped plates and stiffeners having arbitrary o rientation and eccentricity. A consistent formulation has been adopted to incorporate the contribution of the edge restraints in the structu ral stiffness matrix. Numerical examples as available in the literatur e are solved and the comparison of the results indicates good accuracy of the method. New results in the form of natural frequencies corresp onding to the higher modes particularly for plates/stiffened plates wi th nonclassical boundaries are presented.