Free vibration analysis of folded plate structures by the FSDT mesh-free method

Based on the first-order shear deformation theory, a mesh-free Galerkin method for free vibration analysis of stiffened and un-stiffened folded plates and plate structures is presented in this paper. The folded plate or plate structure is modelled as a composite structure that consists of flat plates. The stiffness and mass matrices of the flat plates are derived based on the mesh-free formulation. To avoid the failure of direct superposition, a treatment is introduced to modify the stiffness and mass matrices. The global stiffness and mass matrices of the entire folded plate or plate structure are then obtained by superposing the modified stiffness and mass matrices of the flat plates. The analysis of the stiffened folded plates or plate structures proceeds in a similar fashion, as they are regarded as composite structures of stiffened and un-stiffened flat plates. The stiffness and mass matrices of the stiffened flat plates are also given by the mesh-free method. As no meshes are used in deriving the stiffness and mass matrices, the proposed method is more flexible in studying problems for which remeshing is inevitable with the finite element methods. Several numerical examples are computed with the proposed method to demonstrate its accuracy and convergence. The results show good agreement with the solutions that have been given by other researchers and ANSYS. © Springer Verlag 2007.