Free vibration analysis of composite rectangular membranes with an oblique interface

The natural frequencies and mode shapes of a composite rectangular membrane with no exact solutions are found by using an analytical method appropriate for the geometric feature of the title problem membrane presented here. The method has a key feature in which the theoretical development is very simple and only a small amount of numerical calculation is required. Example studies show that the natural frequencies and their associated modes obtained from the method are found to be very accurate compared with the results by the FEM (SYSNOISE) or exact solutions. Furthermore, the natural frequencies converge rapidly and accurately to the exact values or the numerical results obtained from the finite element model using meshes sufficient to yield already converging natural frequencies, even when a small number of series functions are used in the proposed method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.