Free vibration analysis of isotropic and orthotropic triangular plates

A highly accurate and computationally efficient numerical method is developed for the flexural vibration of isotropic and orthotropic triangular plates. A set of two-dimensional orthogonal plate functions is used as an admissible displacement function in the Rayleigh-Ritz method to obtain the natural frequencies and mode shapes for the plates. From a prescribed starting function satisfying the boundary conditions, the higher terms in the orthogonal plate functions are constructed using the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization process. Natural frequencies and mode shapes are obtained for three triangular plates with different support conditions. The obtained numerical results are presented, and the isotropic case is verified with other numerical methods in the literature. © 1990.