Spectral-element method for Levy-type plates subject to dynamic loads

Spectral-element method (SEM) is applied for the vibration analysis of the Levy-type rectangular plates subject to distributed dynamic loads. In the solution procedure, both FFT and inverse FFT computer algorithms are efficiently used to obtain the dynamic responses in time domain. Distributed dynamic load is approximated, as the superposition of equivalent dynamic line loads and the spatial coordinate dependence of equivalent line loads is removed by (spatial) FFT. This procedure transforms the original plate (two-dimensional) problem into an effective beam (one-dimensional) problem so that the solution procedure for one-dimensional structures can be used. Numerical tests show that SEM provides very accurate solutions when compared with conventional finite element solutions.