A vibro-acoustic quality control approach for the elastic properties characterisation of thin orthotropic plates

Many engineering structures are built by assembly of plates, and in recent years there has been a widespread use of composite plates, and in particular of orthotropic plates, to improve dynamic structural performance and reduce structural weight. Depending on the manufacturing process used, orthotropic plates might be affected by variability of the mechanical properties, which in turn will affect their performance. The four elastic constants of orthotropic plates can be obtained via direct static or dynamic tests, or via inverse methods which combine dynamic experiments with mathematical models. However these approaches may not be appropriate for establishing manufacturing variability across a number of manufactured plates, since they might require expensive testing equipment and they may be time consuming. In this paper an inverse procedure based on the Chladni patterns is investigated to analyse thin orthotropic rectangular plates. A detailed mathematical derivation of the equations needed for estimating the elastic constants based on the knowledge of five natural frequencies is presented. The repeatability and reproducibility of the results obtained with the proposed procedure is first assessed, and the evaluation of the manufacturing variability of an ensemble of "nominally identical" plywood plates with the proposed approach is then investigated.