The boundedness of Gorman’s Superposition method for free vibration analysis of plates

Gorman’s Superposition method is known as one of the most efficient methods to solve the eigenvalue problems of plates because of its excellent convergence rate. However, there are few published results available that provide sufficient information on its boundedness. Here we have considered the nature of convergence of the eigenvalues for rectangular plates with the following sets of boundary conditions, completely free, fully clamped and cantilever. This paper shows numerically, the boundedness of the Superposition method for undamped vibration problems of rectangular isotropic plates subjected to different boundary conditions. The Superposition method gives upper bound results for eigenvalues of plates if the building blocks used in the Superposition method are subjected to stiffer boundary conditions than those of the original system being modelled. In contrast, the Superposition method yields lower bound results if the boundary conditions of building blocks are more flexible than those of the original system. The results would be useful to estimate the maximum possible error if the other bound can be obtained by another method.