| Abstract: | Transverse vibrations of a rectangular orthotropic plate with a free edge while the others are supported according to four different combinations of boundary conditions are considered in the present paper. The presence of a concentrated mass is also taken into account. In view of the difficulty of satisfying exactly the natural boundary conditions at the free edge, the fundamental frequency of vibration is determined by means of the optimized Rayleigh-Ritz method and a pseudo-Fourier expansion which contains, in its argument, the optimization parameters γi. The results are in excellent agreement with those obtained by means of a finite element algorithmic procedure. |
