The Galerkin element method applied to the vibration of rectangular damped sandwich plates

The Galerkin element method (GEM), which combines Galerkin orthogonal functions with the traditional finite element formulation, has previously been applied successfully to the vibration analysis of damped sandwich beams, and an improved iteration method was developed for its eigen solution. In the current paper, this promising method is extended to the vibration of damped sandwich plates. A quite different model is formulated which has both nodal coordinates and edge coordinates, while in the case of beams, there are only nodal coordinates. Displacement compatibility over the interfaces between the damping layer and the elastic layers is taken account of in order to ensure a conforming element and thereby guarantee good accuracy. The seed matrix method is proposed for simplifying the building of the element mass, stiffness and damping matrices. Numerical examples show that the application of the GEM to sandwich plate structures is computationally very efficient, while providing accurate estimates of natural frequencies and modal damping over a wide frequency range. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.