The effects of large vibration amplitudes on the axisymmetric mode shapes and natural frequencies of clamped thin isotropic circular plates. Part I: iterative and explicit analytical solution for non-linear transverse vibrations

The effects of large vibration amplitudes on the first two axisymmetric mode shapes of clamped thin isotropic circular plates are examined. The theoretical model based on Hamiltonʹs principle and spectral analysis developed previously by Benamar et al. for clamped–clamped beams and fully clamped rectangular plates is adapted to the case of circular plates using a basis of Besselʹs functions. The model effectively reduces the large-amplitude free vibration problem to the solution of a set of non-linear algebraic equations. Numerical results are given for the first and second axisymmetric non-linear mode shapes for a wide range of vibration amplitudes. For each value of the vibration amplitude considered, the corresponding contributions of the basic functions defining the non-linear transverse displacement function and the associated non-linear frequency are given. The non-linear frequencies associated to the fundamental non-linear mode shape predicted by the present model were compared with numerical results from the available published literature and a good agreement was found. The non-linear mode shapes exhibit higher bending stresses near to the clamped edge at large deflections, compared with those predicted by linear theory. In order to obtain explicit analytical solutions for the first two non-linear axisymmetric mode shapes of clamped circular plates, which are expected to be very useful in engineering applications and in further analytical developments, the improved version of the semi-analytical model developed by El Kadiri et al. for beams and rectangular plates, has been adapted to the case of clamped circular plates, leading to explicit expressions for the higher basic function contributions, which are shown to be in a good agreement with the iterative solutions, for maximum non-dimensional vibration amplitude values of 0.5 and 0.44 for the first and second axisymmetric non-linear mode shapes, respectively.