Nonconservative stability of viscoelastic plates subject to triangularly distributed follower loads

Divergence and flutter instabilities of viscoelastic rectangular plates under triangularly distributed tangential follower loads are studied. Two sets of boundary conditions are considered, namely, simply supported plates and plates with a combination of clamped and simply supported edges. The constitutive relations for the viscoelastic plates are of Kelvin-Voigt type with the effect of viscoelasticity on stability studied numerically. The method of solution is differential quadrature which is employed to discretize the equation of motion and the boundary conditions leading to a generalized eigenvalue problem. After verifying the method of solution, numerical results are given for the real and imaginary parts of the eigenfrequencies to investigate flutter and divergence characteristics and dynamic stability of the plates with respect to various problem parameters.