Natural Vibration Modal Analysis of Material-Properties-Graded Plates

Abstract

In this study, the present authors propose a new concept in solid, plate and shell numerical modeling, that is, material-properties-graded modeling, which may be a kind of extension of well-known functionally-graded material (FGM) modeling. This has recently been motivated by today's vital research and development activities in the field of additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing of complicated structures posed by topology optimization design, where more rational material properties with density or microscopic porosity varied or graded in the structures can be designed by density-based topology optimization (SIMP method) and then manufactured by various additive manufacturing or 3D printing methods such as fused deposition modeling (FDM). In this article, we try to explicate the present numerical modeling based on the well-verified plate/shell theories with transverse-shear-deformable higher-order displacement assumptions.