A parametric study on the free vibration of a functionally graded material circular plate with non-uniform thickness resting on a variable Pasternak foundation by differential quadrature method

This paper presents a parametric study on the free vibration analysis of a functionally graded material (FGM) circular plate with non-uniform thickness resting on a variable Pasternak elastic foundation. The mechanical properties of the material vary in the transverse direction through the thickness of the plate according to the powerlaw distribution to represent the constituent components. The equation of motion of the circular plate has been carried out based on the classical plate theory (CPT), and the differential quadrature method (DQM) is employed to solve the governing equations as a semi-analytical method. The grid points are chosen based on Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto distribution to achieve acceptable convergence and better accuracy. The influence of geometric parameters, variable elastic foundation, and functionally graded variation for clamped and simply supported boundary conditions on the first three natural frequencies are investigated. Comparisons of results with similar studies in the literature have been presented and two-dimensional mode shapes for particular plates have been plotted to illustrate the effect of variable thickness profile.