Scaling laws for vibration response of anti-symmetrically laminated plates

The scaling laws for vibration response of anti-symmetrically laminated plates are derived by applying the similitude transformation to the governing differential equations directly. With this approach, a closed-form solution of the governing equations is not required. This is a significant advantage over the method employed by other researchers where similitude transformation is applied to the closed-form solution. The scaling laws are tested by comparing the similitude fundamental frequencies to the theoretical fundamental frequencies determined from the available closed-form solutions. In case of complete similitude, similitude solutions from the scaling laws exactly agree with the theoretical solutions. Sometimes, it may not be feasible to select the model which obeys the similarity requirement completely, therefore partial similitude is theoretically investigated and approximate scaling laws are recommended. The distorted models in stacking sequences and laminated material properties demonstrate reasonable accuracy. On the contrary, a model with distortion in fiber angle is not recommended. The derived scaling laws are very useful to determine the vibration response of complex prototypes by performing the experiment on a model with required similarities.