Prediction of Natural Frequency of Laminated Composite Plates Using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

The paper is focused on the application of artificial neural networks (ANN) in predicting the natural frequency of laminated composite plates under clamped boundary condition. For training and testing of the ANN model, a number of finite element analyses have been carried out using D-optimal design in the design of experiments (DOE) by varying the fibre orientations, –45?, 0?, 45? and 90?. The composite plate is modeled using linear layered structural shell element. The natural frequencies were found by analyses which were done by finite element (FE) analysis software. The ANN model has been developed using multilayer perceptron (MLP) back propagation algorithm. The adequacy of the developed model is verified by coefficient of determination (R). It was found that the R2 (R: coefficient of determination) values are 1 and 0.998 for train and test data respectively. The results showed that, the training algorithm of back propagation was sufficient enough in predicting the natural frequency of laminated composite plates. To judge the ability and efficiency of the developed ANN model, absolute relative error has been used. The results predicted by ANN are in very good agreement with the finite element (FE) results. Consequently, the D-optimal design and ANN are shown to be effective in predicting the natural frequency of laminated composite plates.