Free flexural vibration of symmetric angle-ply triangular composite laminates

This paper reports an extension of previous work [1] to the study of the free flexural vibration analysis of symmetrically laminated triangular plates. The analysis is performed by using a simple and straightforward pb-2 Rayleigh-Ritz method. A governing frequency equation for the laminated triangular plates with different combinations of free, simply supported or clamped edge conditions is derived. Although only the vibration frequencies for cantilevered right-angled and isosceles triangular plates are reported, the method is readily applied to general triangular laminated plates. In the present analysis, the effects of material properties, the number of layers and different fibre stacking sequences of various composites on the vibration frequencies are investigated. Convergence tests have been carried out for selected plate examples to demonstrate the accuracy of the solutions.