Vibration analysis of corrugated Reissner-Mindlin plates using a mesh-free Galerkin method

A mesh-free Galerkin method for the free vibration analysis of unstiffened and stiffened corrugated plates is introduced in this paper, in which the corrugated plates are simulated with an equivalent orthotropic plate model. To obtain the corresponding equivalent elastic properties for the model, a constant curvature state is applied to the corrugated sheet. The stiffened corrugated plates are treated as composite structures of equivalent orthotropic plates and beams, and the strain energies of the plates and beams are added up by the imposition of displacement compatible conditions between the plate and the beams. The stiffness matrix of the whole structure is then derived. The proposed method is superior to the finite element methods (FEMs) because no mesh is needed, and thus stiffeners (beams) do not need to be placed along the mesh lines and the necessity of remeshing when the positions of the stiffeners change is avoided. To demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of the proposed method, several numerical examples are analyzed both with the proposed method and the finite element commercial software ANSYS. Examples from other research are also employed. A good agreement between the results for the proposed method, the results of the ANSYS analysis, and the results from other research is observed. Both sinusoidally and trapezoidally corrugated plates are studied. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.