A combined theoretical and experimental investigation on free vibration of thin symmetrically laminated anisotropic plates

A generalized boundary-continuous displacement based double Fourier series solution to the boundary-value problem of free vibration of thin anisotropic fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) rectangular plates is presented. The transverse vibrational characteristics of laminated anisotropic plates with arbitrary combinations of admissible boundary conditions are theoretically investigated. Numerical results presented here pertain to the natural or resonant frequencies of five-layer symmetric cross-ply plates with all edges clamped, and rotated cross-ply anisotropic plates with all edges simply supported, which are, in turn compared with the corresponding experimental results for two sets of glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) thin anisotropic rectangular plates, fabricated using two different techniques. The influence of possible defects generally encountered in the fabrication process on the experimentally obtained resonant frequencies is also discussed here. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.