Vibration analysis of rectangular plates with general elastic boundary supports

In this investigation, the Rayleigh–Ritz method is used to determine the modal characteristics of a rectangular plate with general elastic supports alone its edges. Each of the admissible functions here is composed of a trigonometric function and an arbitrary continuous function that is introduced to ensure the sufficient smoothness of the so-called residual displacement function at the edges. As a result, a drastic improvement of the convergence can be expected of the solution expressed as a series expansion in terms of the admissible functions. Perhaps more importantly, this study has developed a general approach for deriving a complete set of admissible functions that can be universally applied to various boundary conditions. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of the current solution.