Free vibration of Levy-type rectangular laminated plates using efficient zig-zag theory

First time, an exact solution for free vibration of the Levy-type rectangular laminated plate is developed considering the most efficient Zig-Zag theory (ZIGT) and third order theory (TOT). The plate is subjected to hard simply supported boundary condition (Levy-type) along x axis. Using the equilibrium equations and the plate constitutive relations, a set of 12 m first order differential homogenous equations are obtained, containing displacements and stress resultant as primary variables. The natural frequencies of a single-layer isotropic, multi-layer composites and sandwich plates are tabulated for three values of length-to-thickness ratio (S) and five set of boundary conditions and further assessed by comparing with existing literature and recently developed 3D EKM (extended Kantorovich method) solution. It is found that for the symmetric composite plate, TOT produces better results than ZIGT. For antisymmetric and sandwich plates, ZIGT predicts the frequency for different boundary conditions within 3% error with respect to 3D elasticity solution while TOT gives 10% error. But, ZIGT gives better predictions than the TOT concerning the displacement and stress variables.