Abstract
The free vibration behavior of rectangular plates provides important technical information in structural design, and the natural frequencies are primarily affected by the boundary conditions as well as aspect and thickness ratios. One of the three classical edge conditions, i.e., free, simple supported and clamped edges, may be used to model the constraint along an edge of the rectangle. Along the entire boundary with four edges, there exist a wide variety of combinations in the edge conditions, each yielding different natural frequencies and mode shapes. For counting the total number of possible combinations, the present paper introduces the Polya counting theory in combinatorial mathematics, and formulas are derived for counting the exact numbers. A modified Ritz method is then developed to calculate natural frequencies of anisotropic rectangular plates under any combination of the three edge conditions and is used to numerically verify the numbers. In numerical experiments, the number of combinations in the free vibration behaviors is determined for some plate models by using the derived formulas, and are corroborated by counting the numbers of different sets of the natural frequencies that are obtained from the Ritz method.
