A unified Chebyshev–Ritz formulation for vibration analysis of composite laminated deep open shells with arbitrary boundary conditions

In this paper, a unified Chebyshev–Ritz formulation is presented to investigate the vibrations of composite laminated deep open shells with various shell curvatures and arbitrary restraints, including cylindrical, conical and spherical ones. The general first-order shear deformation shell theory is employed to include the effects of rotary inertias and shear deformation. Under the current framework, regardless of boundary conditions, each of displacements and rotations of the open shells is invariantly expressed as Chebyshev orthogonal polynomials of first kind in both directions. Then, the accurate solutions are obtained by using the Rayleigh–Ritz procedure based on the energy functional of the open shells. The convergence and accuracy of the present formulation are verified by a considerable number of convergence tests and comparisons. A variety of numerical examples are presented for the vibrations of the composite laminated deep shells with various geometric dimensions and lamination schemes. Different sets of classical constraints, elastic supports as well as their combinations are considered. These results may serve as reference data for future researches. Parametric studies are also undertaken, giving insight into the effects of elastic restraint parameters, fiber orientation, layer number, subtended angle as well as conical angle on the vibration frequencies of the composite open shells.