Flutter instability of damped plates under combined conservative and nonconservative loads

The combined flutter and divergence instability of plates of arbitrary geometry subjected to any type of boundary conditions under interior and edge conservative and nonconservative loads are solved in presence of external and internal damping. In contrast to previous investigations, the membrane stress resultants are not in general uniform, since they result from plane stress problem under the given body forces (conservative and nonconservative) and the prescribed inplane boundary conditions. The differential equations of the problem are derived using Hamilton’s principle. The resulted initial boundary value problem is solved using the analog equation method (AEM), which is a BEM-based domain meshless method. The combined action of conservative and nonconservative forces is also investigated. Several plates have been studied and useful conclusions on the effect of boundary conditions and damping on flutter load have been drawn. The obtained numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the developed method and its capability to solve realistic engineering problems.