Vibration analysis of arbitrarily shaped sandwich plates via Ritz method

This article presents the Ritz method for the vibration analysis of sandwic h plates having an orthotropic core and laminated facings. The planform of the plate may take on any arbitrary shape. On the basis of the Mindlin plat e theory and the Ritz method. the governing eigenvalue equation for determi ning the natural frequencies was derived. The Ritz method was automated and made computationally effective for general-shaped plates with any boundary conditions by (1) adopting the product of polynomial functions and boundar y equations that were raised to appropriate powers and (2) applying Green's theorem to transform the integration over the general-shaped domain into a closed line integration. The Ritz formulation and software were verified b y the close agreement with vibration frequencies obtained by previous resea rchers for a wide range of subset plate problems involving isotropic, lamin ated, and sandwich plates of various shapes. Moreover. sample natural frequ encies of sandwich plates with laminated facings are presented for some qua drilateral plate shapes. These frequencies should be useful as reference re sults to researchers who are developing new methods or software for vibrati on analysis of sandwich plates.