An analytical method for vibration of laminated composite rectangular plates having arbitrary combinations of boundary conditions

This work presents a method of analysis for solving the free vibration of symmetrically laminated composite rectangular plates having any combination of free, simply supported and clamped edges along four sides. This approach uses a Ritz method for the energy functional, and trial functions used for deflections are introduced so as to automatically include geometric boundary conditions for a prescribed boundary. A computer code was developed to calculate natural frequencies and mode shapes for the problem, and was used to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the present approach.