In-plane vibration analysis of annular plates with arbitrary boundary conditions

In comparison with the out-of-plane vibrations of annular plates, far less attention has been paid to the in-plane vibrations which may also play a vital important role in affecting the sound radiation from and power flows in a built-up structure. In this investigation, a generalized Fourier series method is proposed for the in-plane vibration analysis of annular plates with arbitrary boundary conditions along each of its edges. Regardless of the boundary conditions, the in-plane displacement fields are invariantly expressed as a new form of trigonometric series expansions with a drastically improved convergence as compared with the conventional Fourier series. All the unknown expansion coefficients are treated as the generalized coordinates and determined using the Rayleigh-Ritz technique. Unlike most of the existing studies, the presented method can be readily and universally applied to a wide spectrum of in-plane vibration problems involving different boundary conditions, varying material, and geometric properties with no need of modifying the basic functions or adapting solution procedures. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the current solution for predicting the in-plane vibration characteristics of annular plates subjected to different boundary conditions.