Abstract: This paper discusses the problems of the bending, stability and vibrations of the rectangular plates with free boundaries on elastic foundations. In the present paper we select a flexural function, which satisfies not only all the boundary conditions of free edges but also the conditions at free corner points, and consequently we obtain a better approximate solution. The energy method is used in this paper.

Key words: eigenfunction expansion method, two-dimensional (2D) elasticity problem, upper triangular differential system, general solution