Prediction of natural frequency of basalt fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) laminated variable thickness plates with intermediate elastic support using artificial neural networks (ANNs) method

The paper is focused on the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in predicting the natural frequency of basalt fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) laminated, variable thickness plates. The author has found that the finite strip transition matrix (FSTM) approach is very effective to study the changes of plate natural frequencies due to intermediate elastic support (IES), but the method difficulty in terms of, a lot of calculations with large number of iterations is the main drawback of the method. For training and testing of the ANN model, a number of FSTM results for different classical boundary conditions (CBCs) with different values of elastic restraint coefficients (<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>K</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>T</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math>) for IES have been carried out to training and testing an ANN model. The ANN model has been developed using multilayer perceptron (MLP) Feed-forward neural networks (FFNN). The adequacy of the developed model is verified by the regression coefficient (<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mi>R</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math>) and Mean Square error (MSE) It was found that the R2 and MSE values are 0.986 and 0.0134 for train and 0.9966 and 0.0122 for test data respectively. The results showed that, the training algorithm of FFNN was sufficient enough in predicting the natural frequency in basalt FRP laminated, variable thickness plates with IES. To judge the ability and efficiency of the developed ANN model, MSE has been used. The results predicted by ANN are in very good agreement with the FSTM results. Consequently, the ANN is show to be effective in predicting the natural frequency of laminated composite plates.