Bloch–Floquet bending waves in perforated thin plates

Abstract

This paper presents a mathematical model describing propagation of bending waves in a perforated thin plate. It is assumed that the holes are circular and form a doubly periodic square array. A spectral problem for the biharmonic operator is formulated in a unit cell containing a single defect, and its analytical solution is constructed using a multipole method. The overall system for the coefficients in the multipole expansion is then solved numerically. We generate dispersion diagrams for the two cases where the boundaries of holes are either clamped or free. We show that in the clamped case, there is a total low-frequency band gap in the limit of inclusions of zero radius, and give a simple formula describing the corresponding band diagram in this limit. We show that in the free-edge case, the band diagram of the vibrating plate is much closer to that of plane waves in a uniform plate than for the clamped case.