Free vibration analysis of moderately thick functionally graded plates by local Kriging meshless method

This paper mainly Presents free vibration analyses of metal and ceramic functionally graded plates with the local Kriging meshless method. The Kriging technique is employed to construct shape functions which possess Kronecker delta function property and thus make it easy to implement essential boundary conditions. The eigenvalue equations of free vibration problems are based on the first-order shear deformation theory and the local Petrov-Galerkin formulation. The cubic spline function is used as the weight function which vanishes on internal boundaries of local quadrature domains and hence simplifies the implementation. Convergence studies are conducted to examine the stability of the present method. Three types of functionally graded plates - square, skew and quadrilateral plates - are considered as numerical examples to demonstrate the versatility of the present method for free vibration analyses. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.