Application of spectral analysis to vibrating plates of general shape

Lightweight plate structures are widely used in many engineering applications, their analysis and design calling for fast computational methods. This paper is aimed at investigating the possibility of adopting a set of eigenfunctions evaluated from a simple stucture as a general basis for the analysis of arbitrary-shaped plates with general boundary conditions in the Rayleigh-Ritz condensation method. The proposed technique is applied to skew plates, plates with curved edges, sector circular plates and annular elliptic plates, in conjunction with non standard boundary conditions. The results are compared to those available in the literature and using finite element analysis.