A Novel Analytical Method for Coupled In-Plane and Out-of-Plane Vibrations of Sandwich Plates with Arbitrary Boundary Conditions

Sandwich plates are popular in the research field of vibration damping and are widely used in numerous engineering domains. Sandwich plates have been studied extensively for their excellent performances by a large number of researchers. Due to the interaction between the out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations of the layers of sandwich plates, it is difficult to solve the displacements of each layer in all directions analytically. To deal with this problem conveniently and accurately, a novel analytical method is presented in this study for coupled out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations of sandwich plates, which can be applied to both free and forced vibrations of sandwich plates with arbitrary boundaries. In this method, the core plate is treated as a three-dimensional (3D) problem, and it is assumed that the displacement of the core plate varies linearly along the thickness. Based on the Kirchhoff hypothesis, the displacement solutions of the base and constrained plates of the sandwich plate in the $x$, $y$ and $z$ directions are expressed as a superposition of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) Fourier series, respectively. By comparison to the published analytical solutions and numerical results of the finite element method, the proposed method achieves excellent accuracy and reliability. In addition, the influence of out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations of sandwich plates on each other is studied, and the effects of geometrical and material parameters on the dynamic behaviors of a sandwich plate are investigated. The result shows that the out-of-plane vibration affects the in-plane vibration significantly, which means that the coupling effect of the out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations must be taken into account when analyzing in-plane vibration.