A simple but exact method for vibration analysis of composite laminated plates with all edges simply supported and under lateral and in-plane loading

A simple but exact method of calculating the natural frequencies of vibration for some structural members with all edges simply supported and under lateral and in-plane loading, is presented herein. This method uses the deflection influence surfaces which can be obtained by any method for vibration analysis and consists of determining the deflected mode shape of the member due to the inertia force under resonance condition. Beginning with initially guessed mode shape, exact mode shape is obtained by the process similar to iteration. In this paper, equations are given for the case of special orthotropic laminates. However, the same equations can be used for any laminate as long as B16, B26, D16, and D26 are negligible as the number of plies increases and some laminates having such properties are presented.