Design of in-plane functionally graded material plates for improved vibration characteristics

A method for improving the vibration characteristics of plate structures is proposed. This method uses functionally graded material (FGM) instead of isotropic material to construct the plates. The volume fraction of each material constituent is defined in the plane of the plate by a 2D trigonometric law, while the material properties through the thickness are assumed constant. The finite element method is used for modal and harmonic analysis, and a genetic algorithm is utilized for optimization of the chosen objective function. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated by two design problems. In the first design problem, FGM is used to maximize the fundamental frequencies of plates with different boundary conditions. In the second design problem, the kinetic energy of a vibrating FGM plate is minimized at a specific excitation frequency. These example design problems show that material tailoring of plate structures using FGM can result in substantial improvements of their vibration characteristics. The r...