Gokhan Altintas

The Effects of Orthotropic Materials on the Vibration Characteristics of Structural Systems

Abstract The rapid growth in anisotropic material (such as composite materials) usage marks a new era in material science. Obviously, in order to understand the physical behavior of structural systems constituted by composite materials, several parameters, such as natural frequencies, mode shapes, and transmissiblities, must be incorporated into anisotropic elastic analyses. Orthotropy, as a special case of anisotropy, is common in almost all fields of civil and mechanical engineering. The objective of this effort is to investigate the effect of orthotropy on the behavior of vibrating plate systems near degenerate modes. A degenerate plate may be lack of geometric stability since the plate may exhibit a qualitatively different behavior under an arbitrarily small change in special parameters. The special parameters considered in this study are orthotropy and the location of additional mass, which have the effect of removing the system symmetry. The method, which depends on a variational procedure in conjunction with a finite difference method, is employed to examine free vibration characteristics as well as to characterize steady state response to a sinusoidally varying force applied to orthotrophic elastic rectangular plate. The problem is reduced to the solution of a system consisting of algebraic equations by using the variational difference method (VDM). In order to sort the effect of orthotropy on the vibration behavior from other factors, locations of external force, and mass are treated as additional parameters in the analyses. Furthermore, supports are constituted as elastic so as to be able to obtain force transmissibility curves. Finally, plate systems having two different boundary conditions, namely elastically supported and elastically point supported, are utilized to observe the generalization of the outcomes. Results reveal that in case of material orthotropy existence in a plate system, there are several keynote issues that must be taken into account in vibration analyses, which are not important under isotropic conditions. Obviously, these effects are of theoretical importance and should be considered in practical applications.