Dynamic Stability of Orthotropic Viscoelastic Rectangular Plate of an Arbitrarily Varying Thickness

The research object of this work is an orthotropic viscoelastic plate with an arbitrarily varying thickness. The plate was subjected to dynamic periodic load. Within the Kirchhoff–Love hypothesis framework, a mathematical model was built in a geometrically nonlinear formulation, taking into account the tangential forces of inertia. The Bubnov–Galerkin method, based on a polynomial approximation of the deflection and displacement, was used. The problem was reduced to solving systems of nonlinear integrodifferential equations. The solution of the system was obtained for an arbitrarily varying thickness of the plate. With a weakly singular Koltunov–Rzhanitsyn kernel with variable coefficients, the resulting system was solved by a numerical method based on quadrature formulas. The computational algorithm was developed and implemented in the Delphi algorithmic language. The plate’s dynamic stability was investigated depending on the plate’s geometric parameters and viscoelastic and inhomogeneous material properties. It was found that the results of the viscoelastic problem obtained using the exponential relaxation kernel almost coincide with the results of the elastic problem. Using the Koltunov–Rzhanitsyn kernel, the differences between elastic and viscoelastic problems are significant and amount to more than 40%. The proposed method can be used for various viscoelastic thin-walled structures such as plates, panels, and shells of variable thickness.