Vibration analysis of discontinuous Mindlin plates by differential quadrature element method

A new numerical technique, the differential quadrature element method (DQEM), has been developed for solving the free vibration of the discontinuous Mindlin plate in this paper. By the DQEM, the complex plate domain is decomposed into small simple continuous subdomains (elements) and the differential quadrature method (DQM) is applied to each continuous subdomain to solve the problems. The detailed formulations for the DQEM and the connection conditions between each element are presented. Several numerical examples are analyzed to demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of this new method to the free vibration analysis of the Mindlin plate with various discontinuities which are not solvable directly using the differential quadrature method.