Free vibration and buckling analysis of plates using B-spline wavelet on the interval Mindlin element

A finite element method (FEM) of B-spline wavelet on the interval (BSWI) is used in this paper to solve the free vibration and buckling problems of plates based on Reissner-Mindlin theory. By aid of the high accuracy of B-spline functions approximation for structural analysis, the proposed method could obtain a fast convergence and a satisfying numerical accuracy with fewer degrees of freedoms (DOF). The numerical examples demonstrate that the present BSWI method achieves the high accuracy compared to the exact solution and others existing approaches in the literatures. The BSWI finite element has potential to be used as a numerical method in analysis and design.