Thin plate spline radial basis function for the free vibration analysis of laminated composite shells

In this paper, the free vibration characteristics of laminated composite cylindrical and spherical shells are analyzed by the first-order shear deformation theory and a meshless global collocation method based on thin plate spline radial basis function. The singularity of thin plate spline radial basis function is eliminated by adding infinitesimal to the zero distance. Several numerical examples are used to show convergence of the present method and choose the proper shape parameter. It is found that the natural frequencies computed by thin plate spline radial basis function with shape parameter m = 4 converge most rapidly. In the comparison study, the present results are in good agreement with the results of Reddy and Liu [8] and Ferreira et al. [21].