Free vibration of generally-laminated, shear-deformable, composite rectangular plates using a spline Rayleigh-Ritz method

A Rayleigh-Ritz method is presented for predicting the natural frequencies of flat rectangular laminates which can have arbitrary lay-up. The effects of through-thickness shear deformation are included in the analysis. The displacement field utilises B-spline functions in what has been referred to in earlier work as a B_{k, k?1}-spline Rayleigh-Ritz method and the approach is versatile in the specification of boundary conditions. The results of a number of applications are presented in the form of studies showing the convergence of frequency values with increase in the number of spline sections used. The analysis procedure is seen to have good convergence characteristics when dealing with laminates of thin and thick geometry.