Non-linear vibrations of simply supported rectangular cross-ply plates

Abstract

A method of direct numerical integration of the frequency-ratio expression is proposed to study the non-linear free vibration behaviour of rectangular cross-ply laminates. The proposed method, even with single-term approximations for the admissible functions, yields results that agree very well with the existing perturbation solutions. Non-linear behaviour of the cross-ply laminates is also studied with the harmonic oscillations assumption, by using the conservation of energy and the modal equation. The results are found to be lower and upper bounds to those obtained from the direct numerical integration method. It is also observed that the arithmetic mean of the two solutions with the harmonic oscillations assumption matches very well with that of the direct numerical integration method. Non-linear vibration characteristics are obtained for several configurations of cross-ply plates. Results for orthotropic and isotropic plates are also obtained as special cases.