Natural frequency of laminated composite plate resting on an elastic foundation with uncertain system properties

Composite laminated structures supported on elastic foundations are being increasingly used in a great variety of engineering applications. Composites exhibit larger dispersion in their material properties compared to the conventional materials due to large number of parameters associated with their manufacturing and fabrication processes. And also the dispersion in elastic foundation stiffness parameter is inherent due to inaccurate modeling and determination of elastic foundation properties in practice. For a better modeling of the material properties and foundation, these are treated as random variables. This paper deals with effects of randomness in material properties and foundation stiffness parameters on the free vibration response of laminated composite plate resting on an elastic foundation. A C0 finite element method has been used for arriving at an eigen value problem. Higher order shear deformation theory has been used to model the displacement field. A mean centered first order perturbation technique has been employed to handle randomness in system properties for obtaining the stochastic characteristic of frequency response. It is observed that small amount of variations in random material properties and foundation stiffness parameters significantly affect the free vibration response of the laminated composite plate. The results have been compared with those available in the literature and an independent Monte Carlo simulation.