Harmonic differential quadrature method and applications to analysis of structural components

A harmonic differential quadrature (HDQ) method with application to the analysis of buckling and free vibration of beams and rectangular plates is presented. A new approach is proposed for the determination of the weighting coefficients for differential quadrature. It is found that the HDQ method is more efficient than the ordinary differential quadrature (DQ) method, especially for higher order frequencies and for buckling loads of rectangular plates under a wide range of aspect ratios. Also, some shortcomings existing in theDQ method are removed.