Free vibration analysis of elliptic and circular plates having rectangular orthotropy

The natural frequencies and modes of free vibration of specially orthotropic elliptic and circular plates are analysed using the Rayleigh-Ritz method. The assumed functions used are two-dimensional boundary characteristic orthogonal polynomials which are generated using the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure. The first five natural frequencies are reported here for various values of aspect ratio of the ellipse. Results are given for various boundary conditions at the edges i.e., the boundary may be any of clamped, simply-supported or fret. Numerical results are presented here for several orthotropic material properties. For rectilinear orthotropic circular plates, a few results are available in the existing literature, which are compared with the present results and are found to be in good agreement.