A variable kinematic Ritz formulation for vibration study of quadrilateral plates with arbitrary thickness

A new variable kinematic Ritz method applied to free vibration analysis of arbitrary quadrilateral thin and thick isotropic plates is presented. Carrera's unified formulation and the versatile pb-2 Ritz method are properly combined to build a powerful yet simple modeling and solution framework. The proposed technique allows to generate arbitrarily accurate Ritz solutions from a large variety of refined two-dimensional plate theories by expanding so-called Ritz fundamental nuclei of the plate mass and stiffness matrices. Theoretical development of the present methodology is described in detail. Convergence and accuracy of the method are examined through several examples on thin, moderately thick, and very thick plates of rectangular, skew, trapezoidal and general quadrilateral shapes, with an arbitrary combination of clamped, free and simply supported edges. Present results are compared with existing three-dimensional solutions from open literature. Maximum and average differences of various higher-order plate theories and three-dimensional results are also presented with the aim of providing useful guidelines on the choice of appropriate plate theory to get a desired accuracy on frequency parameters. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.