New benchmark solutions for free vibration of clamped rectangular thick plates and their variants

It is of significance to explore benchmark analytic free vibration solutions of rectangular thick plates without two parallel simply supported edges, because the classic analytic methods are usually invalid for the problems of this category. The main challenge is to find the solutions meeting both the governing higher order partial differential equations (PDEs) and boundary conditions of the plates, i.e., to analytically solve associated complex boundary value problems of PDEs. In this letter, we extend a novel symplectic superposition method to the free vibration problems of clamped rectangular thick plates, with the analytic frequency solutions obtained by a brief set of equations. It is found that the analytic solutions of clamped plates can simply reduce to their variants with any combinations of clamped and simply supported edges via an easy relaxation of boundary conditions. The new results yielded in this letter are not only useful for rapid design of thick plate structures but also provide reliable benchmarks for checking the validity of other new solution methods. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.