Plate Characteristic Functions and Natural Frequencies of Vibration of Plates by Iterative Reduction of Partial Differential Equation

Natural frequency coefficients of rectangular plates and the corresponding plate characteristic functions are obtained by reduction of plate partial differential equation to an ordinary differential equation and solving it exactly. The reduction is carried out by assuming a deflection shape in one direction consistent with the boundary conditions and applying Galerkin’s averaging technique to eliminate the variable. The reduction method, commonly known as Kantorovich method, is applied sequentially on either directions of the plate and iterated until convergence is achieved for the natural frequency coefficients. The resulting plate characteristic functions are very good approximations to the normal modes of the plate. The results are tabulated for plates with combination of clamped, simply-supported, and free edge conditions.