Free Vibration Analysis of Discretely Stiffened Skew Plates

Stiffened skew plates find application in various engineering fields. The free vibration characteristics of such plates have been studied by various methods. An orthogonally stiffened skew plate is a skew plate with stiffeners running orthogonal to two opposite edges. To the best knowledge of the present investigators, no previous work has been done for free vibration characteristics of skew plates of such stiffening geometry. The present work studies the free vibration of such plates. The pb-2 Rayleigh–Ritz method was employed due to its accuracy and computational efficiency. The conventional finite element method was also used as a comparative check. A convergence study was first performed for various boundary conditions. Then the vibration of orthogonally stiffened skew plates with different boundary conditions was studied. Close agreement was found between these two methods. The variations of natural frequencies with different parameters, including skew angle ϕ, edge ratio b/a, and height-thickness ratio f/h, were investigated for three types of boundary conditions.