Free vibration studies on stress-free three-dimensional elastic solids

A comprehensive investigation on free vibration of three-dimensional elastic solids of rectangular planform is reported. The continuum is considered to be free from normal and in-plane stresses on the facets. Functions representing the spatial displacement fields of the continuum in a complete Cartesian coordinate system are expressed in terms of sets of orthogonal polynomial functions in the x, y, and z directions. The energy functional derived based on the three-dimensional elasticity theory is minimized to arrive at the governing eigenvalue equation. In this paper, the vibration of stress-free elastic solids in the forms of short columns, thick plates, and solid cubes are studied. Frequency parameters and the first known three-dimensional deformed mode shapes have been generated for these stress-free elastic solids.