Free flexural vibration studies on laminated composite skew plates

This paper presents studies made on fundamental flexural frequencies of isotropic and laminated composite skew plates with simply supported and clamped boundary conditions. The fundamental flexural frequencies have been obtained using finite element, the accuracy of which is verified against literature values. The effects of the skew angle, aspect ratio and length-to thickness-ratio on the fundamental frequency of isotropic skew plates are presented. In addition, the effect of parameters such as skew angle, fiber orientation angle, numbers of layers in the laminate and laminate sequence on the fundamental frequencies of antisymmetric composite laminates have also been presented. It is found that the CQUAD8 element yields better results than the CQUAD4 element in the said study of free flexural vibration. The frequencies are found to increase with the skew angle. When the number of layers in the laminate is large, the variation of frequency with the number of layers is not appreciable.