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This paper presents the free vibration analysis of a composite laminated square plate with complicated cutout. The problem formulation is based on the higher order shear deformation plate theory HDST C0 coupled with a curved quadrilateral p-element. The elements of the stiffness and mass matrices are calculated analytically. The curved edges are accurately represented using the blending function method. A calculation program is developed to determine the fundamental frequencies for different physical and mechanical parameters such as the cutout shape, plate thickness, fiber orientation angle, and boundary conditions. The results obtained show a good agreement with the available solutions in the literature. New results for the fundamentals frequencies of a composite laminated plate with complicated cutout are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the free vibration analysis of a variable stiffness composite laminate (VSCL) square plate with circular cutout. Although the h-version of the finite element method is quite attractive, it could not be used in the VSCL plate. This is due to the difficulties associated with the inter-element continuity for the curvilinear fibre and the fact that the circular cutout cannot be represented accurately. To overcome this problem, a new C0 enriched curved quadrilateral p-element is developed based on the first-order shear deformation theory, in which the transformed reduced stiffness elements are computed exactly within the stiffness matrix, and the curved edges are represented accurately using the blending function method. The convergence properties of the proposed p-version and the results of the numbers of test problems are in good agreement with the results of the literature. The natural frequencies are examined by considering the parabolic fibre orientation, radius of the circular cutout, the plate thickness and the boundaries conditions. It is found that the variation of the fibre orientation have significant effect on natural frequencies, especially for plates with large circular cutout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]