Large amplitude vibrations of thin elastic plates by the method of conformal transformation

A unified method for investigating large amplitude vibrations of thin elastic plates of any shape under clamped edge boundary conditions is presented, based on Von Karman governing equations generalised to the dynamical case. The conformal mapping technique is introduced and the domain is conformally transformed on to the unit circle. The deflection function is chosen beforehand in conformity with the prescribed boundary conditions and the stress function is solved taking only the first term of the mapping function. The transformed differential equations are solved by the Galerkin procedure to obtain the second order nonlinear differential equation for the unknown time function. The time equation is readily solved in terms of Jacobian elliptic functions. Frequency of linear and nonlinear oscillations as well as static nonlinear case are analysed for plates of circular, and regular polygonal shape. Results obtained are compared with other known results. From the comparative study of different results it is observed that the first term approximation of the mapping function yields fairly accurate results with less computational effort.