Vibrations of laminated rectangular plates with intermediate line-supports

In this paper, a computationally efficient and highly accurate numerical method is proposed to analyze the free vibrations of symmetrically laminated rectangular composite plates with intermediate line supports. A set of admissible functions are developed from the static solutions of a beam with intermediate point-supports under a series of sinusoidal loads, in which the beam may be considered to be a strip of unit width taken from the plate in a direction parallel to the edges of the plate. In addition to satisfying both the geometric boundary conditions of the plate and the zero deformation conditions at the line-supports, this set of static beam functions, being different from the existing admissible functions, can also properly describe the discontinuity of the shear forces at the line-supports, so that more accurate results can be expected for the dynamic analysis of laminated rectangular plate with intermediate line supports. The governing eigenfrequency equation is derived by using the Rayleigh-Ritz approach. Several test problems are solved to demonstrate the accuracy and the convergency of the proposed method. Some data known for the first time are given and can serve as the benchmark for further research.