Vibration and buckling analysis of rectangular plates with nonlinear elastic end restraints against rotation

The fundamental natural frequencies and buckling loads of a rectangular plate with nonlinearly rotational restraints are obtained by using the finite element technique. If the rotational springs are unsymmetric the iterative scheme must be employed to acquire the solutions of the nonlinear problem. The values which describe the free vibration and stability behaviour of the plate will increase when either the parameters of rotational spring or the initial rotational angles increase. Incidentally, it can be concluded that these results grown nonlinearly with respect to either the linear or nonlinear rotational spring constants. Finally, both the frequency and stability parameters are evaluated for several boundary conditions which are quite useful in engineering analysis and design. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.