Meshless simulation and experimental study on forced vibration of rectangular stiffened plate

•A meshfree formulation for forced vibration analysis of rectangular stiffened plates is proposed.•The meshfree characteristic of the proposed method guarantee that no meshes are used in deriving dynamic equations of the stiffened plates, therefore the proposed method is more flexible in studying problems.•A new non-contact excitation device is conceived to study the middle point's amplitude of the stiffened plate under the exciting force of different frequencies.•The experimental investigation can be considered as a reference for the future work.