On free vibration response and mode shapes of arbitrarily laminated rectangular plates

Hither-to-fore unavailable analytically obtained mode shapes (eigenvectors) for arbitrarily laminated rectangular plates are presented. The classical lamination theory similar to the Kirchhoff's hypothesis has been considered to formulate the deformation characteristics of the plate. The solution functions based on double Fourier series are utilized to solve the eigenvalue and mode shapes (eigenvector) problems. The numerical results, eigenvalues and mode shapes, are compared with the available first order shear deformation based analytical solutions and commercially available finite element packages, e.g., ANSYS and NISA. Some discrepancies are observed.