Vibration of general-shaped sandwich plates with laminated facings

A Rayleigh-Ritz analysis is presented for the free vibration of skew sandwich plates composed of an orthotropic core and laminated facings. By proposing a set of Ritz functions consisting of the product of mathematically complete polynomial functions and the the boundary equations raised to appropriate powers, the Rayleigh-Ritz method can be automated to handle such composite plates with any combination of edge conditions. For convenience and better accuracy, the Ritz formulation was derived in the skew coordinate system. Vibration frequencies of rectangular plates (a special case of skew plates) obtained via this method have been found to be in good agreement with previous researchers results. Owing to length limitation, only sample vibration frequencies for skew sandwich plates are presented