Transverse vibration analysis of a prestressed thin circular plate in contact with an acoustic cavity

This paper describes the free transverse vibration analysis of a thin circular plate, subjected to in plane stretching, whilst in interaction with a cylindrical acoustic cavity. An analysis is performed which combines the equations describing the plate and the acoustic cavity to form a matrix equation which, when solved, produces the natural frequencies (latent roots) of the coupled system and associated latent vectors which describe the mode shape coefficients of the plate. After assessing the numerical convergence of the method, results are compared with those from a commercial finite element code (ANSYS). The results analysis is then extended to investigate the effect of stressing upon the free vibration of the coupled system.