Flexural and free vibration responses of thick isotropic bridge deck using a novel two variable refined plate theory

Abstract

This work presents a simple exponential shear deformation theory for the flexural and free vibration responses of thick bridge deck. Contrary to the existing higher order shear deformation theories (HSDT) and the first shear deformation theory (FSDT), the proposed model uses a new displacement field which incorporates undetermined integral terms and involves only two variables. Governing equations and boundary conditions of the theory are derived by the principle of virtual work. The simply supported thick isotropic square and rectangular plates are considered for the detailed numerical studies. Results of displacements, stresses and frequencies are compared with those of other refined theories and exact theory to show the efficiency of the proposed theory. Good agreement is achieved of the present results with those of higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT) and elasticity theory. Moreover, results demonstrate that the developed two variable refined plate theory is simple for solving the flexural and free vibration responses of thick bridge deck and can achieve the same accuracy of the existing HSDTs which have more number of variables.