An extended separation-of-variable method for the free vibration of orthotropic rectangular thin plates

This paper proposes a method to solve for closed-form analytical solutions of the free vibration problems of orthotropic rectangular thin plates with arbitrary homogeneous boundary conditions. This proposed method is called the extended separation-of-variable method, in which the mode functions are in a separation-of-variable form, and the frequencies in two spatial directions are mathematically independent of each other.