Free Vibration Analysis of Functionally Graded Skew Sandwiched Plates by Using a New Discrete Kirchhoff Quadrilateral Element

In the present work, a four-node quadrilateral element is developed for the free vibration analysis of functionally graded moderately thick skew sandwich plates. The element has seven degrees of freedom per node namely, two in-plane displacements, the transverse displacement, two rotations of mid plane and two transverse shear strain components at the mid plane. In the present study, Rule of Mixture model is considered. The results for skew sandwich plates with different thickness configurations and with different boundary conditions are compared with the finite element ANSYS results. It is observed that the performance of the present element is quite satisfactory for the sandwich plates considered in this study.