Application of FEA to free vibration of thin plate cylindrical shell

Felippa used both lumped mass (LM) and consistent mass (CM) formulation to compute the natural frequencies and mode shapes of thin plates. The basic element utilized was the Q-19 quadrilateral. For both stiffness and mass matrices, the equations for the internal degrees of freedom at the centroidal node were retained. Consistent and lumped masses were formulated only at the corner nodes and the centroidal node of each element.

 The eigenvalue equations were reduced to standard' form by using the methods explained in Section 2-3. For the lumped mass case, the rotational degrees of freedom were eliminated to reduce the order of the Eigen value problem. We shall consider the results for a simply supported square, plate. A quadrant of this plate was discredited into three different meshes with 4, 16, and 36 elements (Fig. 1-1). Table 1-2 gives the number of equations for the-quarter plate for the various analyses. The results of the analysis are summarized in Table 1-3 and are compared to other element formulations in

Figure 1-1. Comparisons like the one in Figure1-1 indicate clearly that the lumped mass approach provides a more satisfactory solution for the frequencies in plate problems. For example, for the same number of equations, the LCCTLM approach gives a more accurate frequency than the LCCTCM method, Figure 1-1. Moreover, for the same mesh size, the LM frequencies are about as accurate as the CM frequencies, despite the fact that there are two to three times more equations in the CM idealization tables 11-2 and 11-3). In fact, Felippa" found that the LM analysis was approximately fifteen times faster than the CM analysis for the same mesh.

FREE VIBRATION OF CYLINDRICAL SHELLS: The natural frequencies of axisymmetric and asymmetric vibration of cylindrical shells were computed by Ghosh and Wilson," who used the method of separation of variables. The shell was represented by an assemblage of conical frustum elements (Fig.) The separation of variables was accomplished in the following form

Here the symbols with overbars indicate the asymmetric contributions, and those without overbars indicate contributions. u and v are in surface displacement in the meridional (s) an circumferential () directions, respectively whereas W is the transverse displacement, The displacement model was taken in generalized coordinate form as follows:

The vectors of local nodal displacements were

where X is define as dW/dS and 1 and 2 are the nodes of the conical element. The element stiffnesses for each harmonic were formulated in the standard manner. Lumped masses were employed. The cylindrical shell, Figure , was considered clamped at the ends and the natural frequencies were computed for different numbers of axial nodes, M, and of circumferential nodes, In Table the results from the finite element analysis are compared with those obtained from Flijgge's shell equation from experiments. Satisfactory agreement was attained.

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