RITZ VECTOR APPROACH FOR STATIC AND DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF PLATES WITH EDGE BEAMS

A Ritz vector approach is used to develop new formulations for evaluating the static and the dynamic characteristics of rectangular plates with edge beams. Unlike previous studies in which stiffness coefficients with specified distributions along the plate edges are used to represent the effect of edge restraints, the effect of elastic edge restraints is accounted for by including appropriate integrals for edge beams in the expressions for total kinetic and potential energies in a Rayleigh-Ritz approach. The effect of various types of boundary conditions at the beam ends is accounted for by considering the corresponding Ritz vectors. The contribution of beam mass to the total kinetic energy is also considered in the proposed approach. This effect has often been neglected in the previous studies but can be significant in some applications. The results obtained from the application of the proposed approach to a variety of examples are compared with the corresponding results obtained from the finite element analysis.