Abstract
A spline-based differential quadrature method (SDQM) is elaborated and applied to the vibration analysis of rectangular plates with free edges. The sextic B-spline functions are used to construct the pertaining cardinal spline interpolants. Thus, explicit expressions of weighting coefficients for approximation of derivatives are obtained. Free vibrations of rectangular plates with free edges, which pose considerable challenge to the conventional differential quadrature, are dealt with and the results are in excellent agreement with those in the literature, highlighting the effectiveness and potential of the spline-based differential quadrature.