Introduction. The theory of plates with shear deformation has been developed for several decades beginning from the studies [13, 17] (first-order shear deformation theory or Reissner–Mindlin theory [2–4, 20]). The dynamics of plates with shear compliance and rotary inertia was for the first time studied in [6]. Later, extensive studies in this area were performed in [1, 5, 8, 10–12, 16, etc.], where the effect of shear compliance on the natural frequencies was numerically analyzed in detail using various theories. The following circumstance is noteworthy. The first studies on the dynamics of plates and rods with shear deformation ([6], etc.) discovered two spectra of natural frequencies (two very different (low and high) natural frequencies correspond to the same total deflection mode shape). However, the sense of these two branches is still unclear. It is usually stated that the first branch is related to flexural vibrations and waves, whereas the second branch to shear vibrations and waves. Since this is about the ratio between the bending and shear components, which are present in both spectra, the difference between the two spectra appears to be purely quantitative. Some authors cast doubt on the physical sense of the second spectrum for both Timoshenko beams and for plates with shear compliance and proposed to reject the associated results [7, 17, 18]. A literature review indicates that there has yet been no consensus on the sense of the second eigenvalue spectrum. An important fact is pointed out in [19]: for the first spectrum of a Timoshenko beam, the shear and bending angles have the same phase and are added to produce the total deflection angle, whereas for the second spectrum, the shear and bending angles are opposite in phase, and the total angle is equal to their difference. This observation for beams was later confirmed in [9, 17]. As far as we know, such statements, even as illustrative calculations, have not been made for plates. Here we will use dimensionless equations of motion of a plate (in first-order shear deformation theory) that incorporate only one generalized dimensionless shear compliance parameter to rigorously substantiate the qualitative difference between the two natural frequency spectra (for a hinged plate as an example) and carry out a generalized parametrical analysis. 1. Problem Formulation. Basic Equations. There are various ways of deriving the basic equations of the first-order shear deformation theory of plates (discussed in [2, 3, 20, etc.]). The simplest method is given below. Consider an isotropic plate of constant thickness h with the coordinates x and y in the midsurface and the coordinate z running along the normal. Let w x y ( , ) denote the total deflection (resulting from bending and shear), x and y the angles of rotation of normal sections due to bending, and x and y the shear angles (averaged over the thickness of the plate). The total angles of rotation of the normal to the mid-surface in two planes are given by International Applied Mechanics, Vol. 50, No. 2, March, 2014
Read full abstract