Prediction of natural frequencies for thin circular cylindrical shells

Abstract

In this paper an analytical procedure is given to study the free-vibration characteristics of thin circular cylindrical shells. Ritz polynomial functions are assumed to model the axial modal dependence and the Rayleigh-Ritz variational approach is employed to formulate the general eigenvalue problem. Influence of some commonly used boundary conditions, viz. simply supported-simply supported, clamped-clamped and clamped-free, and also the effects of variations of shell parameters on the vibration frequencies are examined. Natural frequencies for a number of particular cases are evaluated and compared with some available experimental and other analytical results in the literature on this topic. These results are given in the form of tables and figures. A very good agreement between the results of the present analysis and the corresponding experimental and analytical results available in the literature is obtained to confirm the validity and accuracy as well as the efficiency of the method.