Vibration analysis of a rectangular thin isotropic plate with a part-through surface crack of arbitrary orientation and position

In this paper, vibration analysis of a rectangular thin isotropic plate with a part-through surface crack of arbitrary orientation and position is performed by using the Kirchhoff plate theory. Simply supported (SSSS), clamped (CCCC) and simply supported–clamped (SCSC) boundary conditions are considered for the analysis. First, the governing differential equation of a cracked plate is formulated. A modified line spring model is then used to formulate the crack terms in the governing equation. Next, by the application of Burger's formulation, the differential equation is transformed into the well-known Duffing equation with cubic and quadratic nonlinearities. The Duffing equation is then solved by the method of multiple scales (MMS) to extract the frequency response curve. Natural frequencies are evaluated for different values of length, angle and position of a part-through surface crack. Some results are compared with the published literature. Amplitude variation with different values of length, angle and position of a part-through surface crack are presented, for all three types of the plate boundary conditions.