A novel 2-D six-parameter power-law distribution for three-dimensional dynamic analysis of thick multi-directional functionally graded rectangular plates resting on a two-parameter elastic foundation

This paper is motivated by the lack of studies in the technical literature concerning to the three-dimensional vibration analysis of bi-directional FG rectangular plates resting on two-parameter elastic foundations. The formulations are based on the three-dimensional elasticity theory. The proposed rectangular plates have two opposite edges simply supported, while all possible combinations of free, simply supported and clamped boundary conditions are applied to the other two edges. This paper presents a novel 2-D six-parameter power-law distribution for ceramic volume fraction of 2-D FGM that gives designers a powerful tool for flexible designing of structures under multi-functional requirements. Various material profiles along the thickness and in the in-plane directions are illustrated using the 2-D power-law distribution. The effective material properties at a point are determined in terms of the local volume fractions and the material properties by the Mori-Tanaka scheme. The 2-D differential quadrature method as an efficient and accurate numerical tool is used to discretize the governing equations and to implement the boundary conditions. The convergence of the method is demonstrated and to validate the results, comparisons are made between the present results and results reported by well-known references for special cases treated before, have confirmed accuracy and efficiency of the present approach. Some new results for natural frequencies of the plates are prepared, which include the effects of elastic coefficients of foundation, boundary conditions, material and geometrical parameters. The interesting results indicate that a graded ceramic volume fraction in two directions has a higher capability to reduce the natural frequency than conventional 1-D FGM.