Complex structures used in various engineering applications are made up of simple structural members like beams, plates and shells. The fundamental frequency is absolutely essential in determining the response of these structural elements subjected to the dynamic loads. However, for short beams, one has to consider the effect of shear deformation and rotary inertia in order to evaluate their fundamental linear frequencies. In this paper, the authors developed a Coupled Displacement Field method where the number of undetermined coefficients 2n existing in the classical Rayleigh-Ritz method are reduced to n, which significantly simplifies the procedure to obtain the analytical solution. This is accomplished by using a coupling equation derived from the static equilibrium of the shear flexible structural element. In this paper, the free vibration behaviour in terms of slenderness ratio and foundation parameters have been derived for the most practically used shear flexible uniform Timoshenko Hinged-Hinged, Clamped-Clamped beams resting on Pasternak foundation. The findings obtained by the present Coupled Displacement Field Method are compared with the existing literature wherever possible and the agreement is good.

The authors developed a simple and efficient method, called the Coupled Displacement method, to study the linear free vibration behavior of the moderately thick rectangular plates in which a single-term trigonometric/algebraic admissible displacement, such as total rotations, are assumed for one of the variables (in both X,Y directions), and the other displacement field, such as transverse displacement, is derived by making use of the coupling equations. The coupled displacement method makes the energy formulation to contain half the number of unknown independent coefficients in the case of a moderately thick plate, contrary to the conventional Rayleigh-Ritz method. The smaller number of undetermined coefficients significantly simplifies the vibration problem. The closed form expression in the form of fundamental frequency parameter is derived for all edges of simply supported moderately thick rectangular plate resting on Pasternak foundation. The results obtained by the present coupled displacement method are compared with existing open literature values wherever possible for various plate boundary conditions such as all edges simply supported, clamped and two opposite edges simply supported and clamped and the agreement found is good.