Free Vibration of Open Circular Cylindrical Composite Shells with Point Supports

Abstract

A variational full-field method is presented in this paper for the free vibration analysis of open circular cylindrical laminated shells supported at discrete points. A differential equation in matrix form is developed using the first-order shear deformable theory of shells, and rotary inertia is included. The displacement fields are defined by using very high-order interpolating polynomials and a large number of preselected nodal points on the reference surface of the shell. Each nodal point has 5 degrees of freedom, three displacement components, and two components of the rotation of the normal to the reference surface. The stiffness and mass matrices are obtained using the strain and kinetic energy functions. The numerical results are calculated for shallow and deep circular cylindrical panels with four-, six-, and eight-point supports along the two parallel straight edges. The values of the natural frequency obtained from the present method show good agreement with published data in the literature.