A reduction method for problems of vibration of orthotropic plates

It is shown that the problem of vibration of an orthotropic plate can be reduced to that of another orthotropic plate by a simple co-ordinate transformation, and reduction formulae are obtained. To justify the reduction formulae, fundamental natural frequencies of orthotropic rectangular plates with various boundary conditions and of a clamped orthotropic elliptical plate are discussed. As an example, an exact natural frequency of a simply supported generally orthotropic skew plate with special flexural rigidities is obtained from that of a simply supported isotropic rectangular plate.