Hydroelastic Vibration of Rectangular Plates

This paper is concerned with the virtual mass effect on the natural frequencies and mode shapes of rectangular plates due to the presence of the water on one side of the plate. The approximate formula, which mainly depends on the so-called nondimensionalized added virtual mass incremental factor, can be used to estimate natural frequencies in water from natural frequencies in vacuo. However, the approximate formula is valid only when the wet mode shapes are almost the same as the one in vacuo. Moreover, the nondimensionalized added virtual mass incremental factor is in general a function of geometry, material properties of the plate and mostly boundary conditions of the plate and water domain. In this paper, the added virtual mass incremental factors for rectangular plates are obtained using the Rayleigh-Ritz method combined with the Green function method. Two cases of interfacing boundary conditions, which are free-surface and rigid-wall conditions, and two cases of plate boundary conditions, simply supported and clamped cases, are considered in this paper. It is found that the theoretical results match the experimental results. To investigate the validity of the approximate formula, the exact natural frequencies and mode shapes in water are calculated by means of the virtual added mass matrix. It is found that the approximate formula predicts lower natural frequencies in water with a very good accuracy.