Vibration and buckling of prismatic plate structures having intermediate supports and step thickness changes Original Research Article

Description is given of the development and use of a general spline finite strip method for predicting natural frequencies and buckling stresses of complex prismatic plate structures. The component plates in general are thin composite laminates whose properties are based on the use of classical plate theory. The assumed strip displacement field allows for the arbitrary location of spline knots in the longitudinal direction and the efficient solution procedure incorporates multi-level substructuring techniques with the use of superstrips. This gives a versatile and powerful analysis capability which allows the solution of problems which involve plate structures with intermediate supports and/or step changes in the thickness of component plates at arbitrary locations lengthwise. The use of this capability is illustrated by description of the solution of a number of problems involving both single plates and complicated structural panels.