Free Vibration of Plates of Various Shapes with Intermediate Point Supports by the Hp-Cloud Method and Lagrange Multiplier

The Hp-Cloud meshless method was developed to study the dynamic analysis of arbitrarily shaped thin plates with intermediate point supports. By proposing a special pattern for the influence radius of nodes and a polynomial type of enrichment function, the Hp-Cloud shape functions with Kronecker delta property were constructed. They can satisfy the zero deflection conditions for the field nodes at the point supports. The results obtained from these shape functions agree well with the previous ones, showing good accuracy and convergence. For plates with sharp corners, it is not possible to construct the Hp-Cloud shape function with Kronecker delta property. To this end, the Lagrange multiplier method was used for enforcing the boundary conditions. The computations were carried out by the Ritz method, and the cell structure method is refined to improve the speed and accuracy of numerical integration on the subscription surface of clouds intersecting with the plate boundaries. Using the algorithm developed, the natural frequencies of plates of various shapes and support patterns were computed. By increasing the number of point supports on the plate edges, the natural frequencies computed of the plate tend to those of the simply supported plate. Appropriate pattern of point supports distribution was presented for modeling the simply supported plates of various shapes by comparing the corresponding natural frequencies.