Free Vibration Analysis of Mindlin Plates Resting on Pasternak Foundation Using Coupled Displacement Method

The authors developed a simple and efficient method, called the Coupled Displacement method, to study the linear free vibration behavior of the moderately thick rectangular plates in which a single-term trigonometric/algebraic admissible displacement, such as total rotations, are assumed for one of the variables (in both X,Y directions), and the other displacement field, such as transverse displacement, is derived by making use of the coupling equations. The coupled displacement method makes the energy formulation to contain half the number of unknown independent coefficients in the case of a moderately thick plate, contrary to the conventional Rayleigh-Ritz method. The smaller number of undetermined coefficients significantly simplifies the vibration problem. The closed form expression in the form of fundamental frequency parameter is derived for all edges of simply supported moderately thick rectangular plate resting on Pasternak foundation. The results obtained by the present coupled displacement method are compared with existing open literature values wherever possible for various plate boundary conditions such as all edges simply supported, clamped and two opposite edges simply supported and clamped and the agreement found is good