Free vibration analysis of shear–deformable Al alloy plates using FEM with first order shear deformation theory

This paper mainly presents free vibration analysis of an isotropic thin plate using first order shear deformation theory. This analysis has been held for four types of aluminium (Al) alloys namely Al 95, Al 96, Al 98 and Al 995. The stiffness and mass matrices are calculated using first order shear deformation theory for two varying thicknesses of the selected materials with the application of Kirchhoff plate theory. This method is useful for getting accurate natural frequencies of rectangular plate due to its lateral strain consideration in plates. The calculated frequencies from the above numerical method have been compared with the frequency values of simply supported rectangular plate from finite element analysis commercial package ANSYS. The numerical values and values from ANSYS correlate well with each other.