The elastic modes of a general circular thin plate (EMCTP), reflecting the natural deformation of the resonance, are applied to the diffraction theory of the optical aberrations in this paper. Our work has shown that the mode shapes of the EMCTP resemble those of the Zernike polynomials. As an application example, the compensations of some low order aberrations of the 2.5 m-wide field survey telescope (WFST) have been performed with the EMCTP. Moreover, a quantitative comparative study of the active optics corrections for the EMCTP and the Zernike polynomials is presented in the numerical analysis. The quantitative analysis results have demonstrated that the efficiency of the EMCTP is superior to the standard Zernike polynomials as well as the annular Zernike polynomials.