VIBRATION ANALYSIS OF PLATES WITH ARBITRARY STIFFENER ARRANGEMENTS USING A SEMI-ANALYTICAL APPROACH

Vibration of plates with arbitrarily oriented stiffeners is studied. The plate may be subjected to in-plane loads and the plate boundaries may be simply supported or rotationally restained. The main objective is to present and validate an approximate, semi-analytical computational model for such plates subjected to in-plane loading. The formulations derived are implemented in a Fortran computer code, and numerical results are obtained for a variety of plate and stiffener geometries. The model may handle complex plate geometries, by using inclined stiffeners to enclose irregular plate shapes. The method allows for a very efficient analysis. Relatively high numerical accuracy is achieved with low computational efforts.