Static and dynamic behaviour of rectangular plates using higher order finite strips

Abstract A higher order finite strip using basic function series in the longitudinal direction and a quintic polynomial in the other direction is developed in this paper and applied to various static and dynamic problems in plates. Excellent results have been obtained for all cases. In the finite strip method, the basic function series satisfy the end conditions in the longitudinal direction of the plate a priori , and a two-dimensional plate bending problem can thus be reduced to a one-dimensional ‘equivalent’ beam problem. As a result, the size as well as the band width of the stiffness matrix has been greatly reduced, and the whole procedure can be programmed on small computers. Also little input data is required for such a program.