This paper investigates the vibration and optimal design of a rotating constrained layer damped plate system. Most of the existing researches treat the plate structures as beams. This work, however, models rotating structures as plates. At the same time, the existing research shows that the constrained layer damping (CLD) is an effective technique for vibration suppressions. Through the models investigated, this paper develops a single layer plate finite element model for a constrained layer damped rotating plate to improve both the accuracy and versatility over previous beam CLD models. Due to the multiple design variables and complex responses, a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to determine the thicknesses of the viscoelastic damping layer and the constraining layer so that the amplitudes with first two modes of the driving point mobility at a selected point of the rotating plate can be minimized. Numerical results show that GA works effectively with developed single layer plate finite element model to find out the optimum configuration. © JVE INTERNATIONAL LTD.