Vibration Analysis of Woven Fiber Metal Laminated Plates - Experimental and Numerical Studies

The present study deals with numerical and experimental investigations on the vibration behavior of fiber-metal-laminated (FML) plates, a new aircraft material. A finite element (FE)based formulation is established for the plate using the first-order Reissner-Mindlin theory, including both fibers and metals of different material properties in alternate layers. A four-node isoparametric quadratic element with five degrees of freedom per node is adopted in the analysis. Convergence studies and comparison with previous studies are made to validate the present FE formulation. A set of experiments was conducted to get natural frequencies of vibration for glass FML (GFML) plates using Bruel and Kjaer (B&K) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analyzer with PULSE platform. The effects of different parameters such as aspect ratio, side-to-thickness ratio, ply orientation, and boundary conditions on the dynamic behavior of the FMLs are studied. Good agreement is achieved between the numerical and experimental results. Both results indicate that increasing the aspect ratio can increase the natural frequency of the FML plate, while the increase in the side-to-thickness ratio decreases the natural frequency of vibration. The boundary conditions can significantly affect the natural frequency of the FML plates due to the restraint effect at the edges.