A differential quadrature nonlinear free vibration analysis of laminated composite skew thin plates

Using a differential quadrature (DQ) method, large amplitude free vibration analysis of laminated composite skew thin plates is presented. The governing equations are based on the thin plate theory (TPT) and the geometrical nonlinearity is modeled using Green's strain in conjunction with von Karman assumptions. To cause the impact due to nonlinear terms more significant, in-plane immovable simply supported, clamped and different combinations of them are considered. The effects of different parameters on the convergence and accuracy of the method are, studied. The resulted solutions are compared to those from other numerical methods to show the accuracy of the method. Some new results for laminated composite skew plates with different mixed boundary conditions are presented and are compared with those obtained using the first order shear deformation theory based DQ (FSDT-DQ) method. Excellent agreements exist between the solutions of the two approaches but with much lower computational efforts of the present DQ methodology with respect to FSDT-DQ method. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.