A spectral-Tchebychev solution technique for determining vibrational behavior of thick plates having arbitrary geometry

This paper presents a new approach, referred to here as the two-dimensional spectral-Tchebychev (2D-ST) technique, to predict the dynamics of thick plates having arbitrary geometries under different boundary conditions. The integral boundary value problem governing the dynamics of plate-like structures is obtained using the Mindlin plate theory and following an energy-based approach. To solve the boundary value problem numerically, a spectral-Tchebychev based solution technique is developed. To simplify the calculation of integral and derivative operations and thus to increase the numerical efficiency of the solution approach, a one-to-one coordinate mapping technique is used to map the arbitrary geometry onto an equivalent rectangular in-plane shape of the plate. The proposed solution technique is applied to various different plate problems to assess the accuracy and show the applicability of the technique. In each case, the convergence of the solution is analyzed, and the predicted (non-dimensional) natural frequencies are compared to those found in the literature or to those found using finite element modeling. It is shown that the calculated natural frequencies converge exponentially with increasing number of Tchebychev polynomials used and are in excellent agreement with those found in the literature and found form a finite elements solution. Therefore, it is concluded that the presented spectral-Tchebychev solution technique can accurately and efficiently capture the dynamics of thick plates having arbitrary geometries. Furthermore, the utility of the 2D-ST is demonstrated by comparing the results obtained using a three-dimensional solution approach. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.