Abstract:

In this paper an Improved Fourier series method has been employed to study the free vibrations of isotropic homogeneous moderately thick open cylindrical shells with arbitrary subtended angle and general elastic restraints. In this method, regardless of the boundary conditions, each of the displacement components of open shell is invariably expressed as a simple trigonometric series with accelerated and uniform convergence over the solution domain. Distributed elastic restraints are used to specify the elastic boundary conditions along the shell edges and therefore, arbitrary boundary restraints can be achieved by varying the values of spring’s stiffness. All the unknown expansion coefficients are treated as the generalized coordinates and solved using the Rayleigh-Ritz technique. A considerable number of new vibration results for isotropic open cylindrical shells with various geometric parameters and boundary conditions are presented. The effects of boundary stiffness, thickness to radius ratio and subtended angle on the vibration characteristics are also discussed in detail.

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