Free Vibration Analysis of Stiffened Plates by Including the Effect of Inplane Inertia

Abstract

A method based on the variational principles in conjunction with the finite difference technique is applied to determine the dynamic characteristic of eccentrically stiffened plates. The inplane deformations in both directions of the plate have been considered and the inplane inertia has been included into the analysis. The strain and kinetic energy for the plate and the stiffener are expressed in terms of discrete displacement components using the finite difference method. The energy functional is minimized with respect to discretized displacement components and the natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes are obtained from the solution of a linear eigenvalue problem. The effect of inplane deformations of the plate and the stiffener and also the effect of inplane inertia on free vibration characteristics of uniaxial and cross-stiffened plates have been examined.